


Hail Finality

by Firelight_and_Rain



Series: Happily Ever After Or Something Like It [4]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Ensemble Cast, Flirting, Gen, Intrigue, Pre-S14, Sanghelios, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-12
Updated: 2017-08-12
Packaged: 2018-12-14 08:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11778939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firelight_and_Rain/pseuds/Firelight_and_Rain
Summary: A family reunion almost goes well, for once. Of course, for the BGC 'almost' always includes crashing spaceships and facing down new and excitingly lethal surprises.





	Hail Finality

**Author's Note:**

> ok so this is very much the rough draft of this project but dammit I've been writing it for over a year now and I'm tired as hell
> 
> also blame wash and lina not me : P

“So,” Wash said. “Where’s Epsilon?”

Wash practically felt himself vibrating with tension at the sight of Lavernius in Maine’s armor, but he thought he did a pretty good job at pretending to still be The Unflappable Wash (forgetting that the man he was addressing had already heard him shrieking about that stupid Basebook thing), and, hey, Church had probably done something that would take his mind off Maine’s armor.

“Uhhhhh,” Simmons started (and continued).

“Dammit, Simmons, give the man some dignity,” Sarge snapped, and oh, this wasn’t sounding good, not at all, but Wash had no idea how many times Church had “died” in front of these men. Apparently it was a lot. Probably he’d just switched off his holographic projection and the sim troopers assumed something had happened to him.

Though if that were the case he should’ve popped out to give them a hard time about it by now.

Tucker shrugged. “I - the suit worked fine, but I can’t get him to talk to me.”

“Oh, he’s probably just mad at you. That happened a lot,” Caboose said.

“I mean. Yeah. But usually he’s just a dick, he doesn’t sulk.”

“Carolina?” Wash asked.

“Well, if I can look at the helmet, I might be able to get him to come out,” Carolina said, something skulking under her voice. “I wouldn’t mind having him back.”

“Oh, right, just when he’s been making himself useful to me.”

“Very charitable, Tucker,” Wash said.

“Not my job. I’m the super awesome hero.” Tucker fiddled with Maine’s - his - goddammit - helmet for a moment before removing it. When his locs fell free, Wash couldn’t help the smallest sigh of relief to see Tucker’s face instead of the helmet. Tucker handed the helmet to Carolina, who took it and put it on, distractedly pacing a little away from the sim troopers. Tucker shook his head, more in a way to fix his helmet hair than as a statement, and sighed in relief, and then sighed again in something else.

Wash told himself not to read anything into Carolina’s body language.

She returned, shaking her head. Gods, Wash hated this whole A.I. thing. He wondered, if Epsilon had only ever been Church, never Alpha or the Director, if they would have been friends.

Yeah, all that stuff in books about maybe not raising the dead? (Not that Wash had ever been much for reading, but he’d picked up things here and there). They weren’t wrong.

*

When Carolina played the message Epsilon had left them all, there was a moment of weighted silence before Tucker yelled “Fuck!”, just this side of screaming it, and made an abortive movement to find something to throw, and not finding anything to throw, just did a sort of full-body pout.  
Wash was, for the immediate aftermath, dealing with this bullshit by staring at the floor of the alien tower. Carolina had had their pilot land them there. Wash was glad for it, now; it provided a certain amount of cloistering isolation.

“No,” Caboose said, definitively, and yeah, that was gonna be the worst part, on top of Tucker’s tattered faith and the fact that somehow Epsilon pulling this shit never got any easier but for Wash’s increasing distance each damn time. Fuck, he couldn’t even claim to care but for a fluke of over-ambitious neurotech with a good heaping of identity issues, and he wasn’t sure who that was saddest for. “No, Church cannot die. I sh - I totally did not shoot him but that is OK because he is. Uh. He is a computer. And he can’t die. Like Freckles.”

Carolina looked to Wash and just as quickly looked away like she didn’t want him noticing that she had in the first place, and said, earnest but stiff and unpracticed, “I’m sorry.”

Wash practiced measured breathing. And, because he was Blue Team leader, for the moment being, if nominally, if Tucker wanted to be C.O.   
Wash couldn’t say he wouldn’t have earned it - “Caboose, Church probably isn’t coming back. I think he deleted the files that, well. Made Church Church.”

“But why would he do that?” Simmons asked. Not sounding heartbroken, but sounding disturbed by it all.

“He probably wanted to prioritize his subroutines to run Tucker’s armor,” Carolina said. She was talking softer than Wash was used to. It was making him uneasy. But he was already uneasy.

“That fucker,” Tucker said. “I was already a badass, he didn’t need to do that.”

Maybe not. Maybe so. It had been close, really close.

*

Wash found himself shadowing Tucker the rest of that day without really thinking about it, keeping a careful eye on the set of his shoulders and the curve of his frown. They both wound up in the infirmary, after having conquered the greatest latest battle of the post-war period and their hospital was, frankly, shit. (But Wash couldn’t complain about low-tech if it came with the people involved actually giving a shit).

Most of the BGC also wound up in the infirmary, and Wash watched with interest as the nurses tried to convince Sarge to remove his power armor so that they could treat him. There was of course much gruff protestation that no pansy-ass politician (never mind the fucking giant space ship and legions of hired guns) could hurt a real soldier, and Caboose was loudly inquiring if they were offering orange juice and cookies, and Simmons was worrying aloud about the sanitation of the infirmary, and Grif was complaining, and Tucker was enthusiastically flirting with any woman who came near him. (Wash expected one of the woman nurses or doctors to stab him with something shortly. He was kind of hoping for it, honestly).

Wash took the medical attention patiently, not really hoping that his teammates would notice and emulate his example, and was rewarded by being able to escape before Dr. Grey showed up.

*

Wash spent most of that night keeping himself from sleep, listening to radio feeds.

He wasn’t looking forward to rubbing elbows with the U.N.S.C. again. Small price to pay for Chorus and his team getting out alright. A price he’d already paid to bring Freelancer down, made sense that Hargrove deserved the same effort.

*

Tucker invited himself into Wash’s closet of a room just about when Wash was waking up, which was - a lot earlier than Tucker was used to waking up, and Wash would know. “Are you naked?” Tucker asked, apropos of nothing. He was still wearing Maine’s armor, but had his helmet off.

Wash scrunched up his face at him. “No.”

“Dammit,” Tucker said. “I was looking forward to giving you a hard time about it.”

“Not my fault you didn’t bring any pajamas to the crash site.”

“Yeah, uh, anyway. Someone’s gonna pick us up off this rock!”

“Really?” Wash said, reflexively sitting up against the wall. It was just, they’d been trying to escape for so long it was frankly ridiculous. “Wait. Why are you so excited? There are women here, and everyone thinks you’re a hero.” Well, Tucker was a hero, but - old habits were hard to break. “Isn’t this, like, vacation for you?”

“Eh, it’s not bad, but Junior’s on the ship! I got a letter!” Tucker waved his datapad excitedly.

“Congratulations. Can I go back to sleep now?”

“After all those morning laps you made me run? No fucking way, dude. Up and at ‘em.”

*

No matter how cheerful Tucker seemed in the short term, Wash fully expected to be picking up the pieces of Church’s latest and likely final abandonment by the expedient of emotionally stilted conversations and awkward personal stories, but that was alright. He was team leader, and he had nothing more noble to be.

They made it to breakfast before Grif ate literally everything available in the mess hall, and Wash let himself blend into the background. Tucker and Vanessa and Dr. Grey were excited for the ship’s arrival, but everyone else seemed to have more mixed feelings on the issue. 

*

But Wash was the only one to successfully slip away from all the fanfare. He wasn’t sure if the U.N.S.C. still thought that he was dead and whether they’d try to arrest him again if they found out that he wasn’t, but as much as he sort of wanted to see Tucker’s reunion with his long-absent son, he wasn’t going to risk it. Even to see his team happy.

*

“Dude, where the fuck have you been?”

“Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you have media to show off for?”

“Look. You remember what happened last time you went missing?”

“Yes.” OK, alright, lack of normal human interaction, Wash, that’s the reason for your stomach doing - whatever it just did right there. “Except this time I hardly got captured by enemy forces.”

“We still don’t know where Locus is.”

“I can take care of myself, Tucker.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“So I - suppose you wanted to introduce me to Junior.”

“Oh, huh? Yeah. He was just catching up with Sarge and the Reds.”

Wait, he can’t speak English, can he? But there was an evil glint in Tucker’s dark eyes that convinced Wash not to ask.

Wash tensed up in fright upon seeing Junior, he couldn’t help it. Out of all his nightmares, stuck holding the line against rampaging Elite was one of the ones lucky enough to get stuffed into a corner in his mind’s attic (that wasn’t what the Freelancers had been used for), but it had millennia of primal fear to back it up, and Junior was a big motherfucker, even for a Sangheili. Somehow.

Sarge thought the same, if his body language was anything to go by - Junior had cornered him in the mess and was halfheartedly trying to communicate (Wash very much suspected that this was Tucker’s fault), while Simmons and Grif watched warily from the food bar (where Wash thought he could see Grif trying to bypass the grate that had been set there since his arrival on Chorus). The only person - including Junior - who didn’t seem deeply uncomfortable with the situation was a small, bodacious woman in garishly yellow booty shorts, who was translating for the two. Unless Junior had somehow found a way to teleport to Blood Gulch while Tucker wasn’t looking and participated in Private Grif the Younger’s raves without Tucker noticing (which, OK, Tucker might love his son but he wasn’t always the most attentive) and without scaring off all the other participants (which was probably the harder condition to meet), he probably wouldn’t be sharing his opinion of them.

And, oh, that’s who the woman in the shorts was. Joy.

“Hey, Kai! I love your parties -”

“You’ve never been to any of her parties,” Simmons pointed out.

“Shut up. Anyway, I was saying, I love your parties, but I’m not sure that Junior’s allowed to attend. I don’t even know what illegal drugs could do to Sangheili. So stop bullshitting Sarge and giving my kid ideas.”

‘Kai’ shrugged and gave Tucker a broad smile. “Why is no one here any fun?”

Yeah, those two were definitely fucking. Well, good on them. Wash was grimly amused at the thought of Kai meeting Carol and Vanessa, if she thought the Blood Gulch crew was grim - he wondered what she’d made of Tex. (He would not have guessed that borderline sadomasochistic flirting had occurred followed by completely neutral coexistence). After Doyle’s death, Vanessa had never quite recovered. Wash wished her well with that, he’d been down that kind of road before.

“Maybe because you weren’t here?”

Grif made a retching sound to break the moment.

“Who’s the guy with the freckles?”

“Uhm.” Wash looked somewhat desperately around the room; while there were few people he wanted to know his identity less than Kai, if she was fucking Tucker and talking to pretty much any of Vanessa’s army, that was already a lost cause. Be brave, Wash. You’re not a fucking special agent anymore. Tucker gave him an encouraging eyebrow lift, which Wash had no idea how to interpret. “I’m Washington.”

“Oh, the cop!”

“I’m not a cop!”

Wash thought that Tucker’s hulking blue son looked vaguely relieved to no longer be the center of attention. Though Wash quickly resolved to never try to read a Sangheili expression ever, ever again, because not only did it not work, but as much as he’d never say it out loud, that face was the stuff of nightmares.

*

“Yeah huh. That’s not an undercover cop answer at all.”

“Kai, he’s actually hiding from the U.N.S.C.. I’m pretty sure that he’s not a cop.”

“Really?” Kai Grif perked up at that. “Why? What did you do?”

“Didn’t get them something that they wanted,” Wash said curtly.

“Ooh, melodramatic. So you don’t have that sexy black armor anymore? Can I have it?”

“Hey,” Grif complained.

“Uh, no, because I think it’s still on Church’s dead body.”

“Chur - oh right. Church died. Except he came back as a ghost. And then he died again. Man, that sucks. You wouldn’t think ghosts could bite it. Well, can I have dead Church’s armor?”

Wash ignored her, mostly because a nagging thought that he flat couldn’t believe hadn’t occurred to him before - so Wash prefered to give himself the benefit of the doubt, if only in the paranoia department, and figure that it had occurred to him before but that it had quickly been buried underneath the routine insanity of the Blood Gulch lifestyle - and that thought was that, holy hell, the U.N.S.C. had to have processed his body years ago. Except that it wasn’t his body.

“Wash?” Tucker asked, and it was still a mystery to all of them whether perceptiveness was just another of Tucker’s natural talents buried under practiced apathy, or whether he just practiced it on Wash.

“The U.N.S.C. know,” he said, and yeah, sorry for ruining your nice family reunion, buddy.

“Wait. What? Shit. Who do you think told them? Though, yeah, it’s - since starting our little thing here it could have been an awful lot of people.” Tucker’s eyebrows beetled together in thought, and his eyes stopped smiling.

“Ooh, do I get to be in on this conspiracy?” Kai asked excitedly.

“Kaikaina!” Grif complained again.

“Don’t bother, dirtbag,” Sarge said, having taken over the quest to steal more food from Kimball’s outfit. “Blue team problems.”

 

“No, I mean that they would have figured it out when they processed Church’s body.”

Tucker opened his mouth to say something.

“Tucker, I’m really sorry, it was very - it’s really nice to meet you, Junior - but I need to go look into this. Like, yesterday.”

Wash was feeling that old companion, his panic, pressing inquiringly at the backs of his lungs, and Junior’s inquiring honk followed him out of the room.

*

So did Tucker, apparently, and he caught up with him just as Wash was booting up his computer console. “Wash? Wash, calm down. I had an idea.”

Wash made a hum of acknowledgement but didn’t turn to him.

“So Church told me how you blew up South just after you guys met.” Wash wondered how the hell bringing that up was supposed to make him feel better. “And when we swapped you and Church, the Director wasn’t still Asshole At Large because he was a war criminal, except that he kind of was because he still had so much shit going on like some kind of really shitty chessmaster dude. So I’d bet that he’d had something in place to make sure that Recovery One - which was supposed to be you - got blown up, too, so no one could look into his super special secret project. So, yeah, your secret identity is probably still safe, dude.”

Wash pulled up a chair and sat down heavily. He thought over what Tucker had said. “Thank you, Tucker.”

“So are you -”

“But it really isn’t.”

“Huh?”

“Because, Tucker, I’ve started wearing my old colors since Felix and Locus and Carolina all got involved,” and he didn’t try to spell out the complicated psychology behind that, going back to his old pack the minute he’d placed the kind of soldier Locus thought himself to embody, “and everyone here knows me as Wash anyway. It’s not that hard to put together.”

“I don’t know. The U.N.S.C. can be pretty fucking stupid.”

It wasn’t the words, it was the way Tucker said them.

“Hey. It was gonna happen some time, dude. Just believe me when I say that no one is messing with our team leader after all the bullshit we went through to get here. I don’t care what the U.N.S.C. wants.”

*

“Hey, I didn’t even properly get to introduce you to my kid.”

*

They had to go track Junior down, and they found him in the armory, generally intimidating everyone there so that they hung back towards the door. Wash figured it was no surprise that Junior had an attraction to guns, being a Blood Gulch kid. The Reds and Kai were nowhere to be seen.

“Blargh?”

“Sorry, Junior! Wash was being Wash so I didn’t get to give you guys a proper introduction, but he’s back to being cool now so - Junior, Agent Washington. Agent Washington, Junior, my kid, who you know about. Apparently he’s a real hot shot with the Sangheili now which I totally knew he would be. Junior, I met Wash when he was being a dick but he’s cool now. In fact, he really helped me be a good captain now. So, uh. Not sure how long Junior plans on staying here at Chorus, but now you two know each other.”

Wash steeled himself and held out a hand, assuming that Junior had seen enough of human interaction - despite his more recent residence on Sangheili-controlled worlds - to know what he was intending. “Nice to meet you, er, again, Junior.” Junior tilted his head down at Wash - and, yikes, that emphasized even more than his size compared to Wash his size compared to his father and offered one of his hands - more human than the rest of him - to shake. They shook.

Tucker offered them a thumbs-up.

“I’m gonna show him around the Republic. Feel free to come with if you want.”

*

Later:

“His full name isn’t Junior - Lavernius Junior, I guess - anymore. He has some sorta Sangheili name now. Rura Satamai. I think it’s kinda badass, honestly, but I’m not sure everyone else will, and I still call him Junior. ‘Cause I named him first. He doesn’t seem to mind.”

 

“I think Rura Satamai is a very phonetically nice name.”

“You’re a dork, Wash, you know that? But yeah, it is.”

*

Kimball called him into her office the morning after the ship settled into orbit around Chorus.

He noted first thing that she still had her suit of armor on. It wasn’t an uncommon thing, even with the war over, and maybe Wash wouldn’t have thought anything of it if he hadn’t known and witnessed Vanessa leaving herself vulnerable and unarmored after Hargrove’s final fall, one of the many ways that she sought to drag the Republic back into civilian life. But he wasn’t surprised by this, either. It was important to project a strong image, after all.

Wash himself went unarmored. It felt strange, but he didn’t have any reason not to keep up with the gesture.

“Tucker has brought something to my attention,” Vanessa said. Wash raised his eyebrows, still a little surprised by things like that. “You’re concerned that the U.N.S.C. is going to give you trouble for your previous involvement with Project Freelancer.”

“What do you know of Project Freelancer?”

He hadn’t told her any details. While his and Locus’ verbal sparring had rarely been private, it hadn’t been broadcast either, and she would have needed context. Wash wasn’t sure how forthcoming Carolina was about it all. She had her knight-errant thing going on, he assumed that she was in better shape than he had been, she and Vanessa had been getting along well recently - similar people that they were.

“Not much,” Vanessa said. “Not that I want my people keeping secrets from me, but .. I can guess that it was very need-to-know.”

“Yeah. It was.”

“Is there anything I need to know now, with the U.N.S.C. here?”

“Only that my involvement with Project Freelancer landed me in a maximum security prison, last time they caught me, even though I brought it down for them. Now that Hargrove’s dead - I don’t know. I probably don’t have anything anyone wants anymore, but.”

I didn’t survive this long by assuming the best of my situation.

Vanessa nodded, having come to her decision. “While I wouldn’t complain about having someone with your expertise helping me when the U.N.S.C. elect wants to talk, I … understand your concerns. I just think that trying to conceal your identity isn’t going to work. There are too many people who know it and no one’s going to get them to shut up completely.”

“I understand.”

She looked like she didn’t understand his passive reaction. “I could assign you somewhere else for the time being, until everything dies down. A planet is a big place to search for someone you lost track of years ago.”

“Thank you.”

*

Wash visited Caboose before leaving, to impart some advice that he was pretty sure wouldn’t stick, and Tucker, because even though he was confident that Tucker could manage things in his absence, he wasn’t going to disappear on the guy. Apparently Sister was a Blue as well, but after a moment of awkward eye contact he’d decided that neither of them needed a goodbye speech. He didn’t bother to inform the Reds, certain that Tucker would take care of it. He told Carolina, who promised to give hell to anyone who came after him, though more as a rote gesture than anything to convince him to stay. Tex projected herself to tell him not to get eaten by an alien or abducted by Santa. Wash thanked her. It felt very strange.

Kimball suggested a station out near the floating towers, protecting Dr. Grey from any lurking space pirates. The second day after arriving at her camp, his radio came alive with Carolina’s voice, telling him that they were Earth-bound.

*

The days were long and soft and alive with the grit of camping. Grey didn’t seem to be bothered by Wash’s quiet, babbling quite enough to fill the silence between them. She psychoanalyzed him four days in, very thoroughly, and didn’t seem bothered when he spent the next day patrolling far, far away from her. He expected that yelling at her wouldn’t help anything when she’d served as Chorus’ unofficial master of torture, even if in the service of what had been his shared cause.

Wash wore his armor the entire time. He found Felix’s body and stripped it of useful technology before leaving it in a shallow grave. He wondered where Locus was. He sent Kimball a short notice in as clinical of wording as he could. He’d been told that it wasn’t a flaw to care for the people you hated. Even the people who left your head a foxhole.

He washed his gauntlets after, so that Grey wouldn’t ask questions.

*

Tucker started bombarding Wash with greetings before his ship even entered orbit. Wash stopped inscribing hieroglyphs for Grey and turned his full attention to the radio, eyes smiling even though no one could see him, as it was passed to Caboose, then Carolina, then Kaikaina Grif, then the Reds.

*

After Hargrove’s trial, the ship’s return, and Wash’s subsequent return to the capitol, President Kimball offered Former Agent Washington the position of an official general in her army, below only her. Because Wash didn’t know if there was any other halfway moral job in the galaxy that he’d be allowed and that could use his skillset, he graciously accepted. Her helmet off and resting on her desk, Kimball smiled in relief. He guessed that she was disappointed that she couldn’t collect Carolina, too.

“I need a first name,” she said.

Wash blinked, taking a moment to parse the question.

“I don’t -” Don’t what, David? He wasn’t sure.

“It’s not another Colonel Sergeant situation, is it?” she joked weakly. Before he could try to reply, she continued, “Don’t worry about it. Chorus has seen enough by now, I’ll just put you down as Washington.”

*

Tucker, Sarge, Donut and Simmons were all made generals - to everyone’s surprise, Kimball secured Lopez a high-ranking military post as well. Marine Gunner. Interestingly, he had an unofficial translator within a few days, though a respectable percentage of Chorusans could speak at least broken Español. (Sarge cried. Wash suspected that Lopez was beyond relieved). 

(Wash also had to provide a sounding board for Lavernius’ self-recriminations and hesitance before Lavernius would agree to his post. He was an old hand at it, by now). 

Caboose’s official station was left … vague. Vanessa confided that that was so that Caboose, war hero or not, could continue to follow Wash’s lead without any formalities in the way. 

Grif made it clear that nothing at all, ever, could entice him back to military life, not even Sarge’s bellowing. But he would be staying on Chorus - hell, what had U.N.S.C. space ever done for him? 

Doc remained as he always was, loosely connected to the U.N.S.C., claiming his position was to serve all sapient life, and claimed by absolutely no one. O’Malley refused anyone’s authority - Carolina got a look on her face like she’d be testing that principle sooner or later. 

Kaikaina asked for a promotion, too. Kimball had to ask what her official rank was. Once she heard, she smoothly allotted her a promotion that put her right under Tucker (presumably so that he could keep an eye on her). Once Tucker found out about the new assignment, he leered from ear to ear and Wash had to give him a speech about not abusing authority that was probably completely useless considering how vocal Kaikaina was about the prospect of fucking her CO at the same time. Grif was somehow always present to give hell to anyone who questioned her fitness for the army, even though he made no secret of how much he himself hated her presence there. But there were few who could argue that Chorus needed more war and fewer entertainers.

*

When the ship was soon to be leaving, Wash walked Carolina to it, all his armor off and tucked away back in his room. The moment before Carolina grabbed him in a hug felt like they were balancing in the very edge of something, but Carolina’s embrace was hard and warm, and Wash wrapped a hand around her shoulder in silent thanks, even if he couldn’t return it all the way back.

*

Wash was having breakfast in his own room, alone, when the radios started blaring. He vaulted out the door and towards Kimball’s command room without even bothering to throw a shirt on.

*

Kimball looked similarly disheveled. Tucker immediately launched a high-five at Wash upon seeing him shirtless. At least, Wash assumed that was what the high-five was for. Simmons was already hunched over the control computers, jabbing away in a seeming random pattern. Donut was hovering over Simmons, rapid-firing questions at him unproductively. Sarge was on a different frequency, throwing orders at whoever was listening. Wash suspected that he should probably keep track of what Sarge was telling their soldiers to do, but he couldn’t tear his attention away from Carolina’s voice.

Kimball! We’ve got an enemy ship approaching. Hostilities seem imminent. The message was crackling and rough. We can try to lead them -

“Agent Carolina!” Kimball snapped. “That ship dies, and we lose any political ties to the U.N.S.C.. You get that ship back here now.”

Tucker’s eyes widened. “Kimball! Can we grab the enemy ship without grabbing Carolina’s?”

“With the pirate’s gravity sinks?” Wash asked for clarification.

“Yeah!” Tucker was bouncing on the balls of his feet, all mounting energy.

“It’s worth a shot,” Vanessa muttered. “Simmons, send messages to any Chorusans near the gravity sinks and tell them to stand at the ready and wait for my commands. Everyone else, get your armor on.”

Kimball herself didn’t have her armor on yet.

*

Agent Carolina had not fought Sangheili during the Great War.

Carolina Church had been trained as an officer. Suspiciously shortly before she was to be launched across the galaxy to engage with humanity’s great enemy, her father the Director started his pet project in full swing and the walls of that decision did not fall away from Carolina until his death. And by then, peace had been reached.

She should have paid more attention to her own species’ fight for survival, she thought while the ship she was on began its dance with the sleek behemoth she could see on the screen. The captain’s wan face reflected in her visor as she turned to her. “Does the quartermaster of this ship have any experience with Covenant?”

They needed a hell of a lot more than a leader, but they also needed a leader, and Agent Carolina had nothing nobler to be.

*

Wash was in charge of evacuating anyone who might be in the zone of destruction to be caused if Kimball and Carolina and Tucker between them managed to bring the Covenant ship to ground. He itched to be elsewhere, but it was a supporting role that’d be easier to live with after it all if any of it went wrong, and Wash was more than a little sure that something was going to go wrong. He radioed the original Rebel lieutenants and roped them into helping him where they were back closer to the capitol. Then he radioed Tucker.

“Dude, what?”

“Where are you?”

“At one of the gravity sinks, duh.”

“Which one?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because, Tucker, the Covenant are going to notice us crashing their ship and they might just notice where you are in the process. Aqua is not a subtle color.”

“Fuck.”

“Indeed. What are your coordinates?” Wash directed another soldier back towards a waiting Pelican and grabbed the light flyer she’d been on, hauling himself into the seat and giving the controls a cursory once-over. He’d never been the best at flying.

*

“Fuck.” Even though the Blood Gulch crew used the word practically as a conjunction, it was still startling out of Vanessa Kimball’s mouth, flat with the pain of the situation.

Carolina didn’t half-ass things, so she thought of her next words carefully. “If it hadn’t been for your decision, my ship would have gone down and they might well still be here. This wasn’t a disastrous choice.” She tried to force the words to sink in, with her hard neon gaze, the ring of her voice, her expression hidden under her helmet. It might have been true. Carolina would have given it good odds, but she’d been a lone wolf for a long time, and her team hadn’t been awfully large before that, even if they had been a handful.

“Right. This is the best we could make it. After all, Chorus is a magnet for trouble.” Kimball spoke to the table, her armor looking disturbingly fragile to Carolina. Not that Carolina had had any intent to get back into the arms-race rat-race killer-track, but if she had any of her father’s genes, she intended to see some of that (“Welcome to the future, Washington”) to the Chorusan’s hands. Good gift-giving was not a skill practiced in a life like hers.

“We need to get everyone into the capitol and take a census.”

“I know the jungle around this part of Chorus better than anyone alive.”

Carolina didn’t doubt it, but - “The fact that this place has so many Sangheili artifacts is not a fact I like when it comes to playing cat-and-mouse with them.”’

Kimball was quiet for a moment. “Lavernius Tucker.”

“What?”

“Lieu - General Tucker has that - whatever it is. His sword. I can’t claim to understand it, but we might just have a bigger trump card in our deck than their alien biology.”

Carolina immediately searched for Tucker’s radio signal, trying against the disheartening fizzle of an overstretched connection.

*

“Fuck.”

Wash didn’t pay much attention to the curse. Tucker had been swearing each moment he got the free breath to, so it probably didn’t mean anything worse than that they were desperately trying to survive a mile or so - OK, Wash had no idea how far up this thing was, sue him - above ground while being shot at and too much in the dark about what was even fucking happening. So, nothing worse than what was not all that unusual in their orbit.

Wash reloaded his gun and left a wounded soldier - Eastmund - to look out into the sky for any sign of movement. There, another formation of Sangheili approaching in their one-alien ships.

“Tucker. Incoming.”

“I’m gonna get so many headshots.” Pause. “Hey, Wash? Why do you think they’re even here?”

*

Wash stabbed at the buttons in frustration. He wondered why Epsilon couldn’t at least have left some better knowledge of computers in his head along with everything else. He wondered why he was making things even gloomier than they already were, hell, Wash.

“I’m not going to wander off if you don’t keep checking on me,” he said at the proximity alert that flashed green for friendly on his HUD.

“War zone? I hate being in charge, I’m not going to let you get killed and leave me the only General here.”

“Charming.”

“Yeah, I know. So, any progress?”

“Not much,” Wash admitted, a little sheepishly.

“Shit. It’s not Sangheili magic, so this key isn’t much use. Think we could nab Locus for this? Turnabout is fair play.” Though he was joking about an allegiance, there was a lingering, ugly anger that Wash could hear.

Wash just heaved a sigh dramatic enough to translate through his body armor. Tucker’s silence turned hesitant and unsure the way it only ever did between the two of them. (Maybe he’d been the same with Church. Wash wouldn’t know).

“What do we do if we can’t reach Kimball?” Tucker asked.

“The good thing is that these gravity sinks give us info on anything happening above us in space. If the Covenant get reinforcements, we’ll know soon enough to make a break for the capitol. As it stands, I still think we should wait to coordinate with Kimball or Carolina. We’re not going to get anywhere more defensible than this for too long to make a break for it and hope for the best.”

“Hey?”

“Yes?”

“Isn’t it funny that - you know, we get called war heroes, and then we have to fucking prove it.”

“Hilarious.”

There was a silent moment. Tucker was thinking about saying something else, Wash could tell. But he didn’t. Everything about his body language was different from Maine’s. It almost made seeing that armor at his side too easy to stand.

*

“Carolina.”

Carolina looked back at Kimball.

“Come back in one piece.”

“I will.”

“But if you don’t, I can always put you back together.” The disturbingly cheerful voice sounded from the mob of people who filtered into the capitol building, where Emily Grey stood at the border of them, watching Carolina.

It was very good incentive to come back in one piece.

*

“That was awesome! And hot. Did I mention that it was hot?”

Ever since Tucker had figured out that Wash wasn’t going to let Carolina beat on him the way Tex had, he’d stopped flinching away from - and stopped stopping running his mouth at - Carolina’s signature death glare.

“Next time, you get to try out your Freelancer armor in a mid-air fight with Covenant banshees.”

“And I totally could.”

Wash tapped his fingers against the grip of his gun, a small tell to try and hold his temper.

“Thank you, Carolina, for helping us out. Now, did Kimball send you for an extraction?”

“No. We need Tucker’s sword.”

“Bow chika wow wow.”

“Need it how?”

“Bow chika -”

“Tucker, I will court-martial you if you keep doing that.”

“How? We’re the same rank now.”

“I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

Carolina crossed her arms at them. “Are you two done?”

“I can go alll n-” before Tucker realized what he was saying, and cut himself short on a dime.

Wash caught Carol’s huff of amusement, quiet as it was.

“We still need to get these soldiers back to the capitol,” Wash said.

“Between the three of us,” Carolina said, “I’m sure we can think of something.”

*

“Caboose?”

“Washingtub!”

“Yes, this is him. Are you alright? Did any Covenant make it into the capitol?”

“Washingtub! Yes we are fine. There were some aliens here but I made them go away because that is what I was told to do.”

“Good job,” Wash said, trying not to smile because that would be horribly inappropriate for the situation. “We’re back in the capitol, I’m coming to check on you right now.”

“Is Tucker dead?”

“No, he isn’t.”

“Is the Freelancer lady -”

“Carolina’s fine, too, Caboose. If anyone … that we’re close to … died, I’d tell you, OK?”

“That is nice of you. I think. Anyway I should probably tell you that our scary new green friend is also OK.”

Washington froze, nearly causing some armored stranger to crash into his back in the middle of the crowded and busy capitol. “Wait, what?”

“Yeeah.”

“Alright, Caboose, under no circumstances talk to him or do what he says or - or -”

“It’s fine. He’s not here anymore.”

“Jesus fucking christ.”

He still had to check on Caboose, of course. Just to be sure.

*

“And you’re sure that he’s not here?” Kimball’s hands were clenched into fists at her sides, and the overt show of tension almost made Wash feel better about what he carried with him.

“Of course I’m not sure.” Wash swung the rifle’s sights around the half-tamed fields, marked with signs of the recent violence, that bordered on the capitol. “We don’t have anything that can get past his cloaking tech. Well. At least he knows I’m still here. If he fucks with Caboose, I’ll find a way to find him.” His words were dramatic enough that Wash vaguely hoped Vanessa realized that it wasn’t just, well, him being him, but for the sake of the off chance that Locus was somehow listening in.

“I’m not so sure that that’s not what he wants,” Kimball said.

“You might be right,” Wash said after a moment, much quieter. “Doesn’t mean we can’t shoot him.”

He thought she smiled at that. “Whatever Locus thinks, he isn’t just your problem. Us Chorusans - the rest of us Chorusans are perfectly capable of dealing with one more mercenary.”

“You’re probably right,” he said, half-teasing.

“But,” Vanessa continued, “if you do manage to find him … I think we’d all feel better with that particular story closed.”

*

Once the Sangheili had been driven off, however temporarily, it was time to take stock of who’d lived and who’d died. Kimball, Grey and Grif (who, of course, Sarge was able to contact in no time flat, despite his passionate resignation from the armed forces of this or any other army) took a census of the civilians of Chorus, and Generals Tucker, Simmons, Sarge and Washington took roll of their soldiers. Carolina patrolled. Wash came into the command room and, somehow, the first thing he noticed was the set of the maroon general’s shoulders. He moved over to him; Simmons startled. Even though, Wash remembered vaguely, Simmons had tried to defect to his team on multiple occasions, they’d never been anything like close.

“I’m sorry,” Wash said. “It’s good that you care.”

There was no question as to why Simmons would be upset. Simmons just shook his head, trying to shake off the help. Wash wasn’t too bothered by that. Hell, what did he know, anyway? Simmons would remember his words. He’d been his CO, after all.

Kimball entered the room with Grey. Simmons straightened like a ramrod the moment he saw her. “Where’s Grif?”

“He’s fine,” Kimball said.

“Dagnabbit,” Sarge said.

“He’s securing the perimeter with Carolina and Kaikaina,” Kimball continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Casualties were lighter than I expected. Probably thanks to Generals Tucker and Washington’s diversion.”

Washington just inclined his head gracefully but Tucker said, “Fuck yeah.”

“Tucker,” Kimball said, and stopped. “I need to talk to you.”

“Huh? Sure.”

“Alone.”

“Huh?”

*

“So, what happened?” Wash asked Carolina when he came across her. The capitol was still more a war-torn madcap camp on this war-torn planet than any sort of proper city.

“Junior’s gone,” she said without any preamble.

“Gone … disappeared? Or gone, dead?”

“The first one.”

“We’ll get him back,” Wash said.

“Sure. It’s not like you didn’t know where I was for seven years.” Despite the bald meaning of the words, there was jest in her voice.

“Hey!”

*

“Tucker?”

“What the fuck do you want, man?”

“I just think we should talk about our plan of attack.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure. I’m in my room.”

*

While there’d been some talk about awarding the war heroes some of the houses (and they must have been so recent before the war started, the civilization on this planet just starting to bud and expand), the Blood Gulch crew lived in one of the official federal compounds (federal, not civilian) for the time being. It was just convenient. Tucker had chosen an apartment close to the center of activity, so, not far from Washington’s own. Wash found himself twisting his hands into the hem of his shirt when he stood in front of the plain, unnervingly medical-looking white door that was shared by every apartment in the place. It was always hard to tell how much Tucker wanted, or could even use, his attention. At least Wash could always count on Tucker sharing his displeasure, no guessing involved in that. Wash knocked on the door.

“It’s not locked.”

Tucker was out of his armor and sprawled on his bed. At least he was wearing clothes. He appeared to have his palms pressed to his eyes.

“We’re going to get him back.”

“Real funny, Wash. When have you ever been the expert on keeping everyone together?”

Since it’s the only thing I’ve got left, I hope.

“Well,” Wash said, trying to force some false cheer into his voice, not caring how false it sounded, “You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

“Shit. I’m sorry.”

And that, more than anything that Lavernius Tucker had yet done, floored Washington. Tucker’s dark, expressive face, turned down at the mouth, somehow looking all-over bruised, was still staring up at the ceiling, giving Wash the privacy of his armor. Wash collected himself. He didn’t think that Tucker would appreciate him vocalizing his appreciation for the gesture.

“So,” Tucker said, throwing an arm over his head onto his pillow. “Do you have some awesome special-agent plan for getting my son back?”

“Not exactly. But we have you, your knowledge of Sangheili and I don’t care if you mostly bullshitted your job as an ambassador you can bullshit this too. We have Caboose and - Santa.”

Tucker barked out a laugh.

“And we have Grey’s knowledge of the alien ruins here, and the best Freelancer I ever fought beside.”

Tucker offered him a watery smile. “I already know I’m dragging you along on this bullshit.”

Wash turned smartly on his heel to look for coffee on the small kitchen counter, cursing his fair, temperamental skin. “I was talking about Carolina, Tucker.”

“Well, yeah. You can’t be in two places at once.”

Wash glared at the wall in place of turning his red face towards Tucker. “Anyway. That’s what we have. My thought is that we see if the Sangheili A.I. can give us a tactical advantage, which at the very least will give us the high ground to see where exactly the Covenant are. We take a small team and don’t endanger any of Kimball’s soldiers - and when we go after Junior, we’ll be providing a distraction for Kimball to grab their supplies from their ship. And if things go really well we might be able to convince them to get the fuck off our planet.”

It means that peace talks have broken down.

“You mean I try to convince them without pissing them off any more than necessary for getting my fucking son back.”

“Yes. That’s about the shape of it.”

“Hey, Wash?”

“Hm?”

“Did you ever fight Sangheili? Before they crashed on our fucking planet, I mean.”

Our planet. Wash hadn’t thought that he’d ever stop running. He liked the sound of it.

“Yes, I did, before Project Freelancer.”

“Did Carolina?”

“I don’t think so.”

*

Sarge agreed to hold down the fort with Kimball without having to be asked twice, bright at the extension of trust even if he threw in a few “dirty blues” along with his reassurances. Simmons gave mocking faux laughter when Carolina asked if he wanted to come along, before trailing off and looking to Kimball. Kimball threw him a bone and suggested he back up Sarge. Simmons, of course, jumped on board with the plan. No one knew where Donut was.

Blue Team problems.

Kimball and Simmons extended their wishes that they bring Junior back safe and sound. The concept of it specifically being a rescue mission seemed to evade Sarge, who didn’t mention Tucker’s son once.

Kimball, Carolina, Wash, and Tucker discussed their plan of attack. Washington felt acutely his sole experience as the soldier who’d fought Covenant. Tucker showed none of his tactical talent that meeting. He sat stiff and quiet, overcome with paternal anxiety.

*

“Hey, Simmons.”

“Ugh, what?” Simmons tried to push his face further into his pillow. He was aware that that wasn’t very professional behavior, but he was sure that one wasn’t required to be professional when one’s best friend’s little sister woke one up in the middle of the goddamn night. “I have to do important things tomorrow, go ‘way.”

Kaikaina sat on his legs and Simmons yelped as her very dense, very hard armor started crushing his sensitive flesh. “Yeah, so do I. I have to go help Tucker gets his giant dog-looking kid back.”

“Then why the fuck are you here?”

“Well, no one asked me to go help, so I had to check in with someone before going and kicking ass tomorrow.”

“Well, I’m not going, so go ask Tucker or something.”

“Oh, hey, I’ll do that. Thanks.” Kai got up and left as if it weren’t un-godly-o’clock in the morning. Simmons groaned in self-pity and rubbed at his legs.

*

They set out early enough in the morning that all the colors in the world were still grey. They were all riding light air vehicles of some sort, Tucker the only one confident enough to use one of the merc’s alien hybrids. He looked otherworldly, sitting astride the strange geometry of the powerful technology, encased in Maine’s modified armor, the color set as bright as a bird of paradise’s, his stance princely. Wash told himself, rather savagely, to stop being greedy-eyed. Why he thought he wasn’t entitled, he couldn’t say.

Carolina hovered her flyer in point position, Tucker and Wash flanking her. Caboose and Kaikaina hovered at the back. Carolina brought up her right hand and gestured follow me.

“Huh?” Caboose asked. Wash was thankful that he’d bothered to help switch Caboose’s external speakers off. Granted, Carolina could talk over their private radio channel just as well, but he suspected that she was using the signals to remind the team of how quiet they were supposed to be. Which, well. Maybe Carolina should just go back to yelling at them.

“We’re just going to stay in the position we’re in and follow Carolina,” Wash told him over the radio.

“OK!” Kaikaina and Caboose answered in unison.

Carolina just shook her head.

*

“Hey, Santa!” Tucker called out after switching on his external speakers.

The A.I. dutifully appeared, red like an afterimage. “Yes, Lavernius Tucker?”

“So there’s sort of another problem that we’d like your help with,” Caboose said, all in a rush before Tucker could say anything more. “Yeah, someone took Tucker’s kid. And we need to find them. And we thought you could help ‘cause this is sort of your house.”

“This plane is not ‘sort of my house’,” the alien A.I. called Santa said, in a tone that might have been teasing if anyone there could deal with the idea of an alien A.I. called Santa not only liking Private Caboose, but deciding to unofficially adopt him.

“You’re doing a really good job of house-sitting,” Caboose said encouragingly.

“Why would anyone sit on a domicile?” Santa asked.

Tucker coughed warningly.

“My friends are kind of in a hurry,” Caboose said.

“You’re in a hurry too, asshole,” Tucker shot at him.

“Right.”

“What do you want from me?” Santa inquired.

“We need to know where these Sangheili attackers are, and if there’s anything you can, and are willing to do, to directly incapacitate them,” Wash said.

Santa swung his head around to stare at Washington. It wasn’t very comfortable for him. Wash hadn’t gone through his test. He hadn’t needed to. Still, he had the unnerving feeling that Santa knew far more about Washington than Washington wanted any stranger to know.

“When I was created, I was created to preserve a culture that was a faithful part of the Covenant,” Santa said. “I am aware of the effects of the Great War, thanks to the information carried to and from this planet now that you have re-established a connection to your U.N.S.C.. I know that my people no longer follow the old ways. However, there are Sangheili back on this planet now. I prefer that to humans. True warrior or not, Caboose.”

“Wait, what?” Tucker demanded. “You don’t know those guys. Those guys are dicks.”

“As you just said,” Santa said, “I do not know them. However, they have not proven themselves. I will not stop you as you try to find your friend’s Sangheili son, Caboose.”

“Fucking fantastic,” Tucker spat.

“You’re not being very friendly,” Caboose told Santa.

*

They were too late. Washington had not been prepared for that eventuality. Being outgunned, sure. Everything going plain FUBAR, sure. Getting plain outrun, somehow not. The kidnappers had been planetbound. Or had been until they left them below and behind in a supernova flash of atmospheric heat and manipulation of gravity.

Tucker, Carolina, and Washington stood still and pale as Lot’s wife in the harsh dying light of the immediate aftermath.

*

“Captain Tornincasa won’t go after them,” Kimball told them collectively, even if she turned towards Carolina as she said it. “Even if the ship could catch them, there’s no guarantee that it will before they make it to Covenant space, and … she’s not willing to risk her passengers’ lives for one non-human prisoner. I’m sorry,” she finished, to Tucker, this time.

“Hey, it’s cool. What have we ever done for them?” Tucker said, voice dripping with bitter sarcasm.

“Well, I think it’s rather rude,” Donut started. “We -”

“Just saved a planet for them when they couldn’t be assed to do it themselves. It’s cool,” General Simmons said. Tucker ignored him.

“Did the Captain at least trace their course?” Carolina asked Kimball, taut danger cordlike under her words.

“I asked her to,” Kimball said, unbothered by the force of Carolina’s personality. “She should be sending the data as soon as - well, I’d say as soon as she has a spare moment, but as soon as it’s convenient.”

“As soon as possible,” Carolina asserted with her arms crossed over her chest.

“You’re on intimidation terms with her, not me,” Kimball said.

*

“I’m not sure that you should come with us,” Wash told Carolina.

She scoffed, sounding for a moment so very like her mother. “Of course I’m coming with you. You don’t think I’m going to let my team go off and chase Covenant without me, do you?”

“I also don’t think it’s a very good idea to leave Sarge and Simmons in charge of defending Chorus.”

“Good point. But I’m still not letting you run off with our boys.”

“At least talk to Kimball before making up your mind.”

“Alright,” she agreed easily.

*

“I can’t ask any of you to put Chorus before any family you might have left,” Vanessa said, “and I won’t. God knows I’ll never have that decision to make. I’m not asking you to stay as your superior, but hopefully as your neighbour.”

Carolina considered an appropriate punishment for Wash, for this. She knew that this conversation would have come along at some time - she had, after all, signed on for a new job, an important job, back on Earth - but she, well. She hadn’t believed it. She didn’t want it to come from Vanessa. She didn’t want it to come from this young-old woman who reminded her so much of who she should have been, who she wouldn’t have asked for the chance to be. Not when Vanessa was out of her armor, the sleek lines of her presidential suit warped on her fatigue-lean, muscle-lean frame.

Carolina shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t think you need my skillset. I think you can hold down the fort just fine.”

 

“Can I? Before the Blood Gulch heroes landed here, the only thing I was doing just fine was leading my people into extinction.”

I’m not good for this, Carolina thought. She remembered how North had comforted everyone he’d met at some point or another, and thought - I’m not good for this. But she said the only good thing she could think of; “You’re a good person, Vanessa.”

“Am I?” Vanessa Kimball asked helplessly, propping her face up between her palms, hollow cheeks looking plump where her hands pressed into her face.

Carolina realized that she’d lost the argument.

Damn Wash.

*

When Wash appeared at Tucker’s door, as predictable as the celestial bodies, Tucker assumed that he was there to offer to his usual moral support. While parts of his spiel were usually pretty pathetic, Tucker couldn’t think of when he’d exactly heard better, and Wash was improving with practice - it’d be unfair to just let him off lightly and deprive him of the practice. Except that when Tucker opened the door for him, he marched right in and informed him that - well, Tucker had to wait to hear what exactly Wash was informing him of because the moment he saw Kaikaina his soldier-walk failed, briefly.

“Hi,” Tucker said.

Kaikaina waved.

“Is this really the time?” Wash asked, long-suffering, as if it was any of his business.

“When else?” Tucker asked - no matter what it might look like, him and Kai curled up together in bed, naked, because he slept naked, duh, and Kai just went with it, they hadn’t been fucking. Tucker wouldn’t call it cuddling. Of course he wouldn’t. Just - catching up in a more comfortable setting. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re leaving soon and I don’t fucking know when I’ll get a chance to have fun again. In case you haven’t noticed, Wash, I’m not exactly a proper soldier. I’ve just been trying to do proper soldier things for a little bit now and - no one comes back from that OK, OK?”

Kai pulled a fold of blanket up to her face and peered wide-eyed over it at Tucker.

Don’t ever stick your dick in crazy.

Sorry, Kai.

“Well, say something,” she told Wash, unexpectedly breaking the silence. “You ruined it so go ahead and say whatever you came in here for.”

Ooh, she’d ruined his timing now. Tucker knew he just had to hate that.

“What I was going to say,” Wash said in roughly the same tone he’d used before, “was that General Tucker and I need to go talk to our Captains before leaving - which, incidentally, includes you, Captain Kaikaina.”

“Wait, do I need to give a speech too? ‘Cause I’m leaving with you guys.”

“I’m … not going to argue that here. Just put some clothes on, the two of you.”

Tucker immediately climbed out of bed - he wasn’t in the habit of being ashamed by his body - to look for his undersuit. Kai reached over to slap him lightly on the ass as he went. Wash turned smartly on his heel and left the room, gingerly closing the door behind himself.

Of course, when Tucker and Kai were fully outfitted, they found him waiting in the hallway like a complete nerd. Tucker found himself grateful for his visor covering his amused, and maybe too affectionate, smirk.

*

They were to embark early in the morning: Chorus was too new for Kimball to hand it another potential failure. Wash and Tucker and Caboose had done damn well, and now Kimball was banking on them being forgotten. After the list of superiors that Wash’d had, he had no room to complain. Kimball had allowed Kaikaina to invite herself along - Wash suspected that she didn’t really think of Kaikaina as Chorus’ yet, and how should he know if the younger Grif was going to stay? It was his job, as unofficial leader of this outfit, to give her the chance to make that decision in the fullness of time, even if he couldn’t pretend to himself that he really saw her yet.

Carolina had eaten breakfast with him in his room. They hadn’t said much, and Wash thought that it was the longest he’d seen her out of armor for he didn’t know how long, though she was still wearing the thin black undersuit. She stayed at the kitchen table and read something on her datapad while he stripped from his grey pajamas into his undersuit, his back to the kitchen, then into his power armor. Sometimes he felt hopelessly like - he was never really in the same room with Carolina. Like the heavy life she carried with her turned him into the absence of Epsilon from his mind and his armor and every line his poor fucked brain drew through the heavy clay that made a man. He loved her completely, and resented that that was stamping patterns into him already because loving people like the Churches - well, that was all justifying the gravitational effects of jumping off a high-rise after the fact, and he’d like to at least be able to trust she’d watch him all the way down. He knew she had less of a ways to crawl back up to grace than he did, but. He’d never done well combining people and reason, for all that people took his cynicism for something like that.

He still didn’t know what she knew about Epsilon. What both of them had seen. He almost wished that she did, just so someone else could be as unbearably uncomfortable with it as he was.

He wondered what Beta knew, and when the hell she intended to tell Allison’s daughter about it.

*

Tucker tried to elbow him, though Wash didn’t much feel it instead of hearing the matte ring of power armor on power armor. Having successfully gotten his attention, Tucker jerked his head towards where Carolina and Kimball were talking. Wash hoped that Tucker didn’t think he was being subtle. “What?” Wash asked, a touch irritably, over their private channel.

“What do you mean, what? Don’t you see that?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Tucker flailed. “Carolina! Kimball! They’re finally gonna get with somebody! Each other!”

“You do know that women have relationships that don’t center around sex, right? And even if they were together, Kimball’s our president. Stop gossiping.”

“Wow, Wash. You are so fucking lame.”

*

Wash liked to think that when he’d been a little younger and a lot harder he’d never have climbed into anything going into space without knowing who was piloting the thing. Unfortunately, he’d never been known as the guy who didn’t fuck it up - quite the opposite, actually.

The pilot didn’t ask whether they’d strapped themselves in. The pilot didn’t say much of anything. Wash assumed that they just weren’t a morning person.

As the tiny shuttle ascended, Tucker planted his boots on the floor and sat as straight as if he could propel himself through the last of the atmosphere and to the end of this mission. Caboose and Kaikaina chatted amiably. Wash thought of nothing.

The tiny frigate latched onto the shuttle, the endless night of space winking away into the grey of the docking bay. Wash tapped Caboose on the shoulder, just in case he’d gotten lost in his head again. Tucker called after the pilot crawling through the hatch into the rest of the ship: “hey, do you know Sangheili territory?”

The pilot stopped, and turned eyes the familiar brown of mother of pearl on the rest of them. “No, but I’m a fast learner.”

Wash felt like he’d been punched in the center of his chest. Tucker was too busy trying to hit on Niner to pay any attention to the other General. Wash would have found somewhere else, anywhere else to be, but Niner was still standing impassive in the only door out of the docking bay, her eyebrows crooked at Tucker, smiling at him somehow like a viper. Niner didn’t even look at him after that one glance.

*

“Long time no see, Washington.”

“Command.”

“I’m not Command anymore. Do you think I followed PFL down the drain? Do you really think that’s a decision I would have made?”

“Not in the least. What I’m wondering is why you’re not living it up on Earth right now.”

“The Chairman got to me first. Sorry, Wash, but after your stint in jail, I didn’t want to try it.”

Wash wanted to punch something.

Tucker was still staring at her like she was fucking Aphrodite. She was still reacting to the attention like she was going to eat him - Tucker didn’t know that this wasn’t a sign of sexual interest, and Wash didn’t feel like enlightening him. Caboose thought that she was multiple distinct people (Wash couldn’t exactly blame him for that one, even he could grant that their shared history was confusing as hell). Kaikaina had complimented Niner on her hair.

*

Wash wasn’t awfully surprised that Tucker followed him into the tiny bathroom. Wash propped his shoulders against the wall, and covered his face with his hand. Tucker, in a completely unexpected fit of sense, shut the door behind himself, though he stayed close to it. “So, is she another one of those crazy bitches we shouldn’t trust even if they’re hot?”

“There are so many things wrong with that sentence, Tucker.”

Tucker crossed his arms at him. “Well? Is she?”

“I won’t trust her anytime soon. But I was part of the Project, too.”

“But her and that fucker Hargrove -”

“I worked for him, too. I fucking shot Donut and Lopez for him.” I lost the Alpha for me. “Don’t look to me for this one. Kimball hired her, apparently. I think.”

Tucker’s flat nose scrunched up at the sides. “Anyone connected to that assmunch the Director is bad news. I’ll give it a pass anyway.”

Wash just let the wall continue to prop him up until Tucker left.

*

He went back to wearing his armor full-time while sharing the frigate with Niner. Niner bent her considerable skillset towards pretending that nothing could possibly be awkward between Wash and her. She and Tucker did not have sex. Tucker and Kai did. Wash reminded himself that he really did need to get around to That Talk with Caboose - Church had apparently not done a very good job, if Caboose’s comments on the topic were any indication.

*

Despite any feelings of betrayal and projected disappointment Washington harbored for Niner (“Phuong”, she’d clarified, one morning at breakfast, strategically getting the word out to all of them at once, strategically divorcing herself from Wash, “My name is Phuong” - he wondered if that was her given name, something no longer classified, what with the death of the Project), she really was an excellent pilot. She’d found the particulate trail left by the Covenant ship, and plotted a trajectory right into Sanghelios. 

“Shit!” Tucker yelled at the news. Wash jumped a little.

“You’re the guy with the plasma sword, right?” Niner - Phuong asked. Names were important. “Didn’t you work for the U.N.S.C. embassy there?”

“Yeah, totally.”

“So are we looking at a diplomatic embarrassment here?”

“Huh? No, dude, they love me.”

Wash gave him a sidelong look. “So why did you complain, exactly?”

“Because it’s a fucking big planet. And that was totally not complaining.”

“So, what do you think?” Phuong asked Tucker, surprising him. Too straightforward, too useful for the company he was still used to. “Would your sons’ kidnappers have any official support in what they did?”

“I doubt it,” Tucker said. “There’s a lot of politics about Junior that I don’t really understand, but most of the Sangheili aren’t Covenant anymore and care more about getting along with us humans than they do about any bullshit prophecy about my kid. Or maybe they do care and are just gonna let him do his prophet thing where he wants to, which is the responsible thing to do. I don’t know.”

“Do not blame Tucker he is new at caring about things and does not really understand how this works,” Caboose said.

“I think he does just fine. Er. I think we all do just fine,” Wash said, trying to talk over everyone else.

“You need to worry about your hairstyle more, old man,” Kaikaina said.

“That’s good,” Phuong said, somehow managing to convey that she was referring to Tucker’s tactical appraisal and not Wash’s hairstyle (which was more or less unchanged since his PFL days, aside from the color). She seemed to have two tones: the biting weariness of an office worker, and deceptively controlled in a way that never sounded controlling - but she had been the strong hand at the end of Recovery One’s leash, even if - Wash could only assume - she had never pitched any of the commands themselves in their genesis. Wash would really like to assume. “We might as well make use of that. Do you think your pals in the embassy could be brought in on this?”

“Probably. Like I said, they like me better than the guys who lost their civil war.”

“Now that does not make sense,” Caboose muttered.

Kai thwap’d him lightly on the shoulder in Tucker’s defense.

“We need to plan before we land,” Wash said.

“Relax!” Phuong replied. “I’ve gotten you out of stickier situations.”

“And got me into them,” Wash muttered like he was less than half his years.

Tucker’s expression started to morph into a leer on reflex. “What kind of sticky -?”

The ship jerked, which was very strange considering that they were gliding through the empty void, and Caboose let out an excited whoop, Tucker cursed, Kai shrieked, and Wash latched onto his chair like he intended to dent it.

“Niner -!”

“Calm down, boys and girls, it’s just a hiccup.”

As his heart-rate calmed, Wash looked at Phuong, and saw a pleased little smile on her lips. It occurred to him that he’d never seen her face as she brought him and the other Freelancers into and out of the fire, that lifetime ago. She looked lean and comfortable in her own skin and civvies, raven hair back in a shaggy ponytail, still wanner than she should have been from lack of the sun and fresh air of a free life. Washington’s heart hurt and lightened at the same time, a sensation like freefall.

*

Turned out Sanghelios at least put on a good show of being happy that Tucker had returned. Wash admired them for it.

*

“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” Kimball told Carolina as the shuttle was in the lengthy process of disappearing from view.

“Sure they will.”

“Look, you know even better than me the kind of stuff they’ve survived.”

Carolina laughed. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do. Just don’t be surprised when they cause an interplanetary incident.”

Kimball still had her arms crossed over her armored chest and was staring up into the sky when Carolina turned away.

*

The problem, Carolina found, was that with Washington gone, she was promoted to buffer between President and remaining Generals. (Not for long, she reminded herself).

“Sarge.” She dragged her palm down her visor with a clank. “You cannot try to lure Locus into the open with a scheme that’s likely to get your soldiers killed. This is not why you were promoted to General.”

General Sarge crossed his arms, planted his feet, and did his best impression of not being shorter than her. It wasn’t very good. Maybe it worked on the Reds, and maybe he didn’t give a damn what the Blues thought (except for Wash, he had a Thing about the other Freelancer, but Wash probably just ignored the technique), but it wasn’t going to work on Carolina. “Well ‘scuse me, Agent Hotshot, but last I checked you’re not part of the Army of Chorus.”

“Do you want to take that up with President Kimball?” Carolina asked, knowing full well that Kimball would side with her over Sarge (in most cases). Maybe Kimball was trying to convince Carolina not to leave Chorus.

“A good General never bothers his commanding officer with irrelevant nonsense!”

“Irrelevant nonsense,” Carolina repeated flatly. Sounds about right.

“Well, Agent, the exact status of a former Freelancer who's not even gonna stick with her rotten Blues is, and I declare, irrelevant.”

Carolina felt a bolt of cold run through her, the exact opposite of the hot rush of her anger. She didn’t intend to go quiet, wrapped up in blustering with Sarge, but she did anyway. General Simmons looked nervously between the two near-statues - and though Simmons technically outranked Carolina on Chorus, everyone there knew that Simmons would never view himself as an equal to his former C.O. and the former Freelancer. “You could prove yourself,” Sarge said abruptly.

“What?”

“You could prove you’re still a red-blooded American citizen and help the good state of Chorus.”

“How?” Carolina asked, tentative, already a graduate of handling the former Blood Gulch crew.

“Help us grab this creepy sonofabitch Locus!”

Which, Carolina figured, was something she’d do anyway. Just - cleaning up loose ties from Charon, since if anyone inherited that mess, it was the highest-ranking surviving member of Project Freelancer.

“Alright,” Carolina said, mildly as she could, “but we’re going to have to work together on this. I’m still leaving, but we’re going to take advantage of my experience while I’m here.”

“Absolutely, Agent,” Sarge said, like there was something he knew that she didn’t.

*

“You absolutely need to not listen to anything that Sarge - Colonel Sarge - says,” Carolina was telling Vanessa when the door creaked open behind them, and Vanessa’s smoke-topaz eyes shot up over her shoulders (Carolina was the taller of the two, being very tall for a woman). “It’s the doctor,” Beta-Tex said, sounding only vaguely interested.

“Hello,” Grey said brightly.

Carolina turned around. Grey had her helmet off, which was unusual, and had it tucked under her right arm. The doctor’s black eyes were even more feverishly bright than usual. Carolina turned a careful eye to the young woman’s health - everyone was young on Chorus, too young - and found it to be, ‘sfar as she could tell, normal for Grey, but Grey was obviously excited by something.

“Doctor Grey,” Vanessa said, in the wounded, defensive tone that she always adopted around Grey. Carolina suspected that it had to do with the fact that if there were still a separate Federal Army of Chorus, Grey would be somewhere at the head of it. They both wanted peace, had wanted peace desperately, and now technically had it, were sharing it, but they were both wrongly red to the elbows with the blood of the other’s friends and family. How did you go forward from that?

Carolina had found it with Wash and Tex and Epsilon, Church and Tucker and the Reds, and all of them had found it to some degree with everyone else in that sorry sort of family tree.

Carolina had some intellectual faith in stalemates and treaties.

Hell, if he were still alive Tucker’s alien hybrid son was supposed to be cementing that between peoples without even any DNA in common.  
Kimball and Grey at least had millions of years of evolution on their side.

“President,” Grey replied with a very sloppy salute. She didn’t seem half as uncomfortable around Kimball as Kimball did around her, but Grey was always giving off the wrong cues. “I’ve heard that there’s been a Locus-sighting nearby?”

Carolina wondered who she’d heard that - accurate - information from. She realized that it could have been veritably anyone.

Kimball was silent for a moment, dark face composed and Sphinxlike, before nodding and answering, “Yes, there has. My generals are currently trying to apprehend him so he can be tried for his crimes.”

Grey smiled at her, like Christmas was coming early. “How’s that coming along, Agent Carolina?”

Carolina thought of Sarge’s latest plan, that had involved first capturing some of Chorus’ more colorful native amphibians and collecting the mucus off their skin, and said, “We’re getting there.”

*

Colonel Sarge was deep in an argument with Lopez when the good Doctor decided to visit.

“Mierda,” Lopez said upon seeing her.

“Problem?” Grey asked politely.

“Más personas bilingües que susto cualquier robot cuerdo,” Lopez said, “perfecto.” And left.

Sarge laughed. “Man, I don’t know what you did to impress him, but good job, little lady!”

Grey’s eyebrows slowly rose towards her hairline. “Uhm, anyway. I heard that you were working with Agent Carolina to apprehend Locus?”

“‘Course! Former Agent Carolina. She’s one of them Blues now. But we’re banding together to catch that shifty character Locus!”

“I want to help,” Grey said. “But I’m not sure that Carolina wants me on board with this project.”

Sarge considered her. He felt, obscurely, that they were supposed to be on the same team. He also remembered her interrogation of the space pirate - what was his name? - with a diffuse proud glow, like that one time Private Donut got the blue flag somehow as a result of Simmon’s and Grif’s hazing.

“Why not?”

“I think that she thinks I’m too emotionally in - vulnerable to work with her on this little Project.”

Sarge gave a thought to what he knew of the Blues, limited as that was, and their habits of tromping down on their wussy feelings and pretending to be all superior instead of getting it all in the messy open and shouting it out like men. Sometimes a character like Locus needed a touch of healthy, traumatized, well-earned rage instead of endless psychoanalysis.

He considered the young woman with her blinding brains and natural-born scientist’s lust for murder.

“Sure, you can be on my team if you’re tough enough for it, soldier.”

She snapped off a sloppy salute. “I’ll be sure to make you proud, General.”

*

“You did what?” Carolina hissed at Sarge.

“You said this project could use all the help I could get. She offered to help.”

“I said that because you were trying to attack Locus with frogs!”

“Now, you said those weren’t frogs. You said those were mystery-ous native specimens of undetermined toxicity.”

“How is that relevant?!”

*

Because Tucker had “gone off” about Locus, who did he think he was, trying to play hero after almost killing a planet on purpose, and other complaints of that stripe, there was, as far as Carolina knew, no one left on Chorus who didn’t know about Locus’ plan to redeem himself by playing vigilante. She was both impressed and a little unnerved that Grey immediately latched onto this for her input to their plot to catch Locus. “We worked well together in the civil war,” Grey said, voice flat, eyes almost dull. “I’m sure that he’ll come to my rescue, if he sees me in danger.”

“And you’re willing to do this?” Carolina asked.

“Yes.”

“The classic damsel in distress scenario.” Sarge preened. “Does this planet have any trains we can use?”

“No,” Carolina said at the same time that Grey said, “yes.”

Carolina looked at Grey. Grey shrugged. “I’m not seconding the General’s suggestion, but Chorus did used to have some of the amenities of civilization.” This was apparently a point of pride with her.

*

Consulting with Sarge, Grey, and Kimball (though she did not really want to involve Kimball), Carolina saw them settle, tentatively, on Grey’s plan. She didn’t contradict them, not only because she was so aware of the tentative balance of power between herself and the President, but because she did not have any better an idea.

If Epsilon had still been there, he would have told her to stop procrastinating.

*

They were welcomed onto Sanghelios. The minute Phuong switched on hailing frequencies, Tucker dove into her space to chatter over the comms. After a minute of back-and-forth, Tucker returned to his seat with a wide grin. “We’re in,” he announced, and they were.

Wash tried not to jump every time one of the Sangheili spoke in their otherworldly voices. Tucker did not stay close by his side. Tucker had his helmet off, lively and proud, and Phuong, cool and poised and curious like a broad-cheeked, freckled, tawny cat, and Kaikaina, curious and vivid as her mess of punk cyan-dyed hair. The port of their meeting was enclosed and climate-controlled so that the humans might adjust to the air of a new ecology before being released upon Sanghelios; Wash doubted that they’d built it for Tucker, but Tucker was obviously familiar with this port.  
(It was only after that, a long time after, that Tucker would confide in Washington that it was like walking on hot coals to be there without Junior rushing out to greet him. He didn’t let it show. It wasn’t Washington who’d taught Tucker to be a leader, a true blue proud hero, but his son, in his own unintentional way, and his son’s people - though how that joining came to be needed only a few words to be made clear as something the dead opposite of wondrous. That confidence also came later, in the natural course of sharing the least wondrous things).

A slightly bent but still hulking Sangheili approached them as they left the port to the city proper. Tucker introduced them, and then to Wash’s alarm grabbed at his arm. Wash had to veritably be hauled forward, not an easy task when Tucker was smaller than him and the armor he was encased in was specifically designed with an eye against letting its resident super-soldier get manhandled. Fortunately for Tucker, Wash made a split second decision to just follow his lead, which meant more than Tucker knew, or could probably guess. Wash stumbled forward a step and caught himself. Not very graceful, but it saved him from participation in his own introduction.

*

“Fucking smooth, Wash,” Tucker heckled as they drove their hovering vehicles - a flying motorbike, a civilian take on the Banshee - through the towering architecture of the Sanghelios city. Over comms.

Wash didn’t say anything.

“Maybe the veteran isn’t comfortable with being in the middle of the alien race that tried to kill him many, many times,” Phuong cut in acerbically. 

“From a distance? Hypothetically?” Kaikaina ventured cautiously.

“A lot of times. I mean, it was war. Take a guess.”

Tucker tried to do an about-face and almost crashed his hoverbike. “Shit, seriously?”

“I was in the war - what did you think I did?” Wash demanded, getting just a little bit squeaky.

“Shout a lot like Sarge?” Caboose volunteered. He’d been miraculously silently for the last two minutes.

“You’re a Freelancer! I thought you were busy doing super-secret Freelancer things! That you felt bad about later!”

Wash thought about what he’d done in the war that had landed him at the mercy of Dr. Leonard Church, and the morality of regret. What he said was: “I only got picked up by the Project after I made Corporal in the war. What, did you think they picked people straight out of boot camp?”

“I sorta thought they recruited you guys from the Men in Black,” Kaikaina said at the same time as Tucker said, “Dude, I thought you were grown in a lab,” and Caboose backed Tucker’s guess, with the qualification of “from the DNA of the half-shark people which are also the people Church’s boyfriend came from.” Wash was unsure what else he’d expected from these people.

“Well, no,” Wash said.

“Alright, that was a dick move of me,” Tucker admitted.

This time Caboose almost crashed his hoverbike, which stalled the whole procession while Wash fussed.

*

They were placed in the embassy while there was a hubbub among the resident Sangheili military. They all crowded into a room with horribly inappropriately-sized tech and Wash plugged a call in to Chorus.

Simmons was on the other side; he looked surprised to see them. He looked tired. Wash realized that he’d been wishing for Carolina to answer the phone (so to speak). “Agent Washington,” Simmons said. “I’m surprised to see you didn’t crash on the way over.”

Wash did his not-smile and figured that if he scared Simmons, well, he’d probably think he did it on purpose, and that was the important part.

“Everything went A-Okay,” Phuong said, perched to the side of the group.

Simmons started and, after fixing his eyes on her, blushed. “Who’s she?”

Phuong’s eyebrows arched. “She can speak for herself, and she is a pilot.”

“Cool,” Simmons squeaked. “Anyway, Tucker, did you get your son back yet?”

“No,” Tucker said shortly.

“Okay, that’s kinda depressing, what can I do for you?”

“Sarge know you’re being nice to some filthy Blues?” Tucker teased.

Simmons gave a dismissive snort. “What the fuck should I care what the old man thinks? He’s not my ranking officer anymore.”

“Can you get Carolina, please?” Wash asked before Tucker could pounce on Simmon’s capital-I Issues.

Simmons shrugged. “Sure. Blue Team issues, what the fuck do I care.” He left. Phuong caught Wash’s eye and raised her eyebrows again. Wash didn’t react - Simmons was Simmons, but it wasn’t any of their business.

Carolina didn’t exactly run into the comm room, but she looked about ready to. She plopped down into the chair and skidded a foot to the left, dragged herself back into position with one hand on the desk and then rested her elbows on it. “Tucker. Wash. Caboose -” She stopped, blinked, and stared at Phuong, looking dumbfounded and a bit betrayed.

Phuong straightened her shoulders as if coming to attention. It was by far the most ruffled Wash had ever seen her, and he found it reassuring even if he shouldn’t. Her eyes skittered a bit to the side of Carolina. “Agent Carolina,” she said, aiming for blaise and missing by a mile.

“Forty-seven niner,” Carolina replied, still disbelieving. Tucker dramatically looked to the side. Carolina looked at him and set her jaw. “Well, you’re all safe. That’s good to know. If there’s anything you need me for, Wash and I have a private channel.” She stood up, just as sloppily as she’d sat down, and left; she was always so tense, nothing looked wrong when she had her back turned.

Phuong covered her face with her hands.

*

Wash went to call Carol on their channel, but Tucker followed him into his room. Wash turned obediently toward him, and didn’t say anything, because he knew he’d hear it anyway.

But instead of any of the things Wash was expecting, Tucker shoved his right hand into his dreadlocks - his nervous tic - and asked, “Is Carolina gonna be alright?”

“I don’t know. Probably. She’d appreciate hearing that you said that,” Wash said, with a sly smile on the last words.

Tucker pulled a face. “Please don’t. I have to keep it cool if I’m ever gonna get with her.”

“Oh, please. I knew her last flame. You’re not nearly on his level.”

“Oh, I’ll show you smooth by the time I’m done! Say, Wash?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you have something you want to share about our resident redheaded Amazon?”

“If you want me to tell you something from our days in Freelancer, one: you think I have a stick up my ass? You should have seen her. And two: even if I did have dirt on her, I’m far more scared of her than I am of you.”

“Oh, I know you’re not scared of me, you’re just a sucker for my heroic charm.”

Wash’s face twitched towards a smile.

“Shit, man, you distracted me! Last flame? Gonna update that high score?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“I don’t know! Shit, you know what I’m getting at.”

“Do I?”

“You and Carolina! Are you or are you not going to hit that?”

Wash made a disgusted noise something like a groan. “Tucker!”

“What! You two are always having secret meetings and emotionally charged cryptic Freelancer conversations and training together!”

“You realize that we trained together too, right?”

“One, we didn’t train together you just yelled at me a lot, and two - one out of three? Weak, Washington, weak.”

“This isn’t a game!”

“Then stop deflecting!”

Wash felt his expression do something odd and then, to his complete shock, he was laughing. He was laughing and he was choking on absolutely nothing from the sheer unexpected sensation and he was pretty sure that he was going to give himself a stitch, but he was laughing in ugly unabashed stattaco breathless bursts. He staggered backwards towards his bed and fell back onto it.

Tucker was staring at him with an expression that Wash couldn’t place and that was like nothing Wash had seen him wearing before. He looked - impressed? “Holy shit, I’ve never seen you really laugh before,” Tucker said, like he was remarking on a heralding angel’s visitation. “You sound like a fucking hyena.”

Wash held his side, unused to the stretch of laughter, instead of the bruising and soreness fighting, of training at best. It occurred to him that the laughter he’d heard from Tucker wasn’t like this, it wasn’t private like this (not private in the sense of being between the two of them, but private in the sense of being invisible to the people Tucker kept performing for, which was almost everyone), and so Tucker had no right to act like this was something overdue. “OK, sure, I’ll be sure never to do it again, then.”

“That is not what I meant at all. It’s,” Tucker seemed not to be looking for a word but to be looking to switch out one he’d already had in mind, “funny. It’s funny.”

“Yeah, that helps,” Wash said sarcastically.

“What, do you want me to compliment your laugh?”

Wash looked to the side. He wasn’t a goddamn kid anymore.

Picking up on something, he wasn’t sure what, Tucker plopped himself down on the bed too. “What were we - oh right, Carolina. You know I’ll spread rumors if you don’t tell me, right?”

“I … I have no idea how to get you to not do that, but I really need you to not do that.”

“I literally just told you how to appease me.”

“I am not sexually interested in Carolina and I will never be sexually interested in Carolina. And if you try to make that sound like an insult, I will kick your ass back to Blood Gulch.”

“OK. Less competition for me. Why not, though?”

Wash spun his helmet between his hands, before pitching it into what he figured was the closet. He knew that he could lie, and he figured that it would probably be better for him to lie, but he also knew he couldn’t bring himself to. Ah well. Things had been going too well for too long, after all. “You figured out whose A.I. Epsilon was, haven’t you?”

Tucker didn’t say anything, but he didn’t look surprised, either. He just watched Wash steadily, eyes now shadowed into inscrutability.

“Well. I didn’t just get the memories of failing everyone I - Alpha - cared about, over and over. And the isolation. That was just a side effect. Though I figure that Epsilon in general was just a side effect.” Wash felt shaken to his core. He wished that Tucker would reach over and touch him, but he knew that that would broach the code of whatever it was they were. Maybe Tucker was growing more something, bolder, or kinder, maybe, around him, but what friendship could be within a military organization still felt as strictly defined as their field manuals. “I ... Alpha had the original Church’s memories, and Epsilon had Alpha’s memories, and I was stuck with Epsilon, so I got the original Church’s memories. Not all of them in a way that makes sense, but a lot of personal memories were mixed in there, too.”

“So, what? The old Church was such an ugly and unpleasant asshole that you lost all interest in human sexual contact after sharing brainspace with him?”

Wash barked out a laugh. There were the things that were going to need saying someday anyway, and then there was Church. Wash figured that that man’d had people obsessing over his virtue plenty enough already - he’d leave the rotted-out wiring in the back of his head where it belonged, since that fixer-up needed more time than one self-destructive soldier could give himself. “Unlike you, I have no interest in sharing Leonard’s embarrassing personal stories.”

Tucker pulled a face. “Leonard? What a fucking nerd.”

Wash hummed quietly in agreement. It was awkward, marking out sovereign borders in his head with the use of appellations that all belonged, in truth, to one person. “Anyway, that’s not it.”

“Then what is it?”

“Have you ever seen Church without his armor on?”

“Of course.”

“They changed some things, on the host body - the eyes, especially - but they still look the same. Of course, I’d notice.”

“Fucking hell, Wash, who look the same?”

“Carolina’s given name is Carolina Church, Tucker.”

Tucker clamped his hands over his generous mouth in shock. His eyes were wide, absorbed as he tried to disprove it to himself. Eventually he said, “that fucking bastard,” in something like awe and something more like revulsion.

Wash took a moment for kicking himself for only then realizing - yes, Tucker was an inveterate flirt, and Wash didn’t always trust his decisions even if he would never offer anything but trust because god damn that’s what Lavernius needed, but more than all of that Lavernius Tucker was a good, decent, devoted father.

On so many levels the exact opposite of Dr. Leonard Church.

That was likely the reason that Alpha and Epsilon had loved him, for all of their protestations to the contrary.

Wash wished better for both himself (miraculously) and Tucker than to believe that that was why he thought so highly of him.

“Did she kill him?” Tucker asked thinly.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I gave her my pistol, but she didn’t give it back, so I think she left it with him.”

“Church should have killed him,” Tucker said fiercely, and Wash didn’t need him to clarify that he meant Epsilon.

“I kind of wish my pistol had done the deed.” Wash mimicked firing a gun with his right hand. Maybe it had. “But I guess there’d be some symmetry either way. After we almost killed each other. And then there was the guy we were trying to get at all along.”

“That’s fucked,” Tucker said reverently.

Wash felt husked. He felt like a bit of space debris, orbiting the binary stars of Tucker and Church. He felt better, like he would after selfishly ripping off a scab.

“You know you haven’t been a horrible friend to her, right? You’ve been a good one. What her dad did to her isn’t on you. And shit, I’m sorry for teasing.”

Wash wanted to say It’s fine, you’re hardly the only one, you were just teasing but he found that something had seized his throat. He slumped to the side, mortified by the rare physical reaction. He pressed the palm of his right hand to his stinging eyes.

“Wash? Wash, are you OK?”

Wash waved a shaky thumbs-up.

He felt a light touch on his shoulder, and the shift of the bed as Tucker stood up and circled around to Wash’s front. Wash tried to shuffle away, and Tucker didn’t crowd him, but he couldn’t hide, and even with the sweetness of Tucker’s obvious concern he hated it.

Wash somehow found the presence of mind and trust to sign out the first thing he wanted to say - Can’t talk.

Tucker rocked back on his heels. “OK. Uh, shit. Are you alright?”

I will be.

“Should I stay?”

And if he hadn’t been drowning under something too easily definable already, that would have been its own jab to the heart, its own coupe de grace. He wanted to say yes more than anything. But he signed - No.

Tucker nodded in acknowledgement, looking towards the door. “I’ll … just go, then. I’m sorry about anything I said or did.” He sounded bitter at himself, and he left like he said he would.

Wash unbent enough to grab the blankets and throw them over himself, and thought that what Tucker thought he’d said wrong was worth whatever would come after.

*

Carolina saw the message of a file sent that evening. She checked the sender’s identity very carefully, certain that Niner wouldn’t have sent it but not wanting to risk any intrusion by most anyone in the galaxy. When she saw it was from Wash, she decided to play it.

*

Wash felt shaky and generally like wet tissue paper the following morning, and mortified over letting himself fall so low in front of Tucker, but he left his room anyway, vaguely worried that the world would have fallen to pieces without him, that the Covenant splinter group would have launched an attack while he was sleeping, deep under the dark of his closed eyelids like smothering tar.

He found himself wandering the alien geometry of the building they were staying in, not sure he wanted to announce his presence to anyone, sure that he’d feel better once he located his team and endured whatever ribbing they had in store for him.

A message popped up on his helmet feed. Where r u? Meeting rn - Cpt. K.G.

On my way. - Gnrl. W.

A moment later.

Where are you? - Gnrl. W.

By the big weird phallic looking statue - Cpt. K.G.

Washington thought about that.

What color is it? - Gnrl. W.

Green. It’s icky - Cpt. K.G.

I’ll be there. - Gnr. W.

Thank God that their Sangheili hosts had uploaded a map for each of them.

*

Kimball side-eyed Carolina. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“No,” Carolina said innocently. 

Kimball slumped down in her seat on her vehicle, arms crossed over the handrail in a bizarrely juvenile mannerism. “Are you sure? Because I suspect that my soldiers are starting to mutiny against me.”

“What’s this about mutiny?”

Kimball twitched a very faint smile at the way Carolina immediately went tense as a hunting cat. “It’s a joke, Carolina. I’m just saying, even though the war’s over, unity is important.”

Carolina found herself smiling. “Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten. I stuck around, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did.” Kimball straightened up in her own chair.

Carolina thought, and dug up her courage. “So - you’re gonna have to adjust to life without war. That’s - that’s a big step.”

“Have you?”

Carolina looked down at her gloves. “I’m getting there.”

“When did you start?” Kimball asked with forced nonchalance.

“Start fighting? I - I went to Westpoint after high school. I didn’t see any active combat before the Project, although I almost did.” The Project had been a hell of its own kind, but she still felt uncomfortable, sitting there next to this younger martyr. “I haven’t considered myself a civilian since. I don’t think I will until I get off of Chorus.”

Vanessa’s mouth downturned. “The Rebel Army formed when I should have been in high school. I was there for the first meetings. I didn’t want a leadership position, I just wanted some … structure. The political tension over the UNSC’s rules and materials rationing had been spilling over into violence for a few years then. I’m luckier than some; the Lieutenants don’t remember living anywhere but war camps before you and the boys came along.”

Carolina’s heart skipped a beat, painfully. “At least Chorus has a different future now.”

Vanessa gave her a smile more painful in its beauty than any heart’s foolishness. “Yes, it does.”

Carolina swore to herself that when she went back to Earth, she’d make damn sure that Chorus never wanted for anything. She wasn’t sure how to do this - but her father had brought a woman back from the dead and her mother made an immortal. How hard could protecting one planet be?

*

Sarge looked between the robot and the doctor. He felt excluded. It wasn’t his damn fault that he didn’t understand Spanish! After another string of the incomprehensible words, Grey stood up, brushing the dirt from her knees. “Well, General. Are you ready?”

“I was born ready,” he said roughly.

“Are you, Doctor?” Kimball called from where she sat near Carolina.

“Ready as I’ll ever be!” Grey chirped.

“Remember, contact us if anything goes wrong,” Carolina said sternly.

Grey rolled her eyes and headed back towards them.

*

Sarge had nightmares about what might happen if his and Lopez’s contraption had even one thing go wrong with it. It had been a long time since his nightmares were half so coherent.

*

Someone new emerged from what Wash assumed was the meeting room, unless Green Phalli were a new architectural craze among the Sangheili. He stopped. She approached him with a professional smile and very white teeth. “I’m Ambassador Gervasius,” she said, extending her hand.

He took her hand and shook it once, firmly. “General Church,” he said equally firmly, feeling awkward.

She gave him a look with quirked brows and lips that he couldn’t quite read. “The other movers and shakers are waiting for us,” she said.  
It was beyond strange to see a competent, normal U.N.S.C. employee. He felt like an escaped zoo animal.

*

“I hate this,” Tucker said.

Though far from comfortable on Sanghelios himself, Wash oriented himself towards Tucker.

“Chorus is some fucking half abandoned jungle, right? This,” he gestured towards the cityscape rushing by them outside the small window, obscuring itself with its architecture and their speed, “this isn’t. And I’m worried about getting anybody hurt.”

Washington considered socking him playfully on the shoulder, the way Tucker so often did to him, but backed down from it. “You know that the Sangheili know what they’re doing. This isn’t your planet. You’ve handled worse, it’ll be fine.”

Tucker socked him on the shoulder, Wash assumed gratefully.

*

The firefight was over three days later. Wash felt like a live wire, and spent the ever so important night of consolidation avoiding Tucker like he was more dangerous than what they’d just been through. He was sure that Kaikaina would take care of him. He wasn’t expecting anyone to catch him out, since Phuong had remained behind in the capital, blithely reminding them all that she was their pilot, not their fellow soldier. She’d joked that one of them should stay behind and keep her company with the perfect mask of the lonely. No, Wash wasn’t going to catch her out, and he wasn’t about to stay behind.

“Agent Washingtub?”

Wash considered fleeing his - and it was somehow a surprise to realize it - most faithful friend, but mustered his courage and walked out of the shadow of one of the recently plasma-scarred buildings in that remote red province.

“Yes, Caboose?”

“Tucker’s son was going to be here? Is he all right?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re trying to figure that out right now,” he said, too tired to put a better face to facts.

His comm channel pinged and he jumped violently. “Tucker?” he rasped out in question once his heart stopped skipping so many beats.

“Dude, are you OK? Because you don’t sound like it.”

Wash checked in long enough to check that Caboose wasn’t trying to tell him anything. Caboose wasn’t saying anything, just staring blankly at the dead heretics. Wash already felt too sick for it to affect him any.

“I’m fine,” he said curtly. “Do we have the data recovered yet?”

“Uh, yeah.” Tucker gave an odd little laugh over the line. “We think they took him to the fucking moon. One of the moons. They took him to one of their fucking moons.”

“Well, good thing we’re space marines,” Wash said drily, and cut the line before he could hear any reply to his half-hearted joke. He felt like the boiling vacuum.

For some reason all he could think was that Michael J. Caboose had been born on the moon.

*

Sarge woke up to Lopez waiting outside his door. He raised his eyebrows, not bothered by his lack of helmet. “Funny seeing you here, Lopez,” he said. “Got somethin’ to say?”

Lopez just shoved a paper note at his chest, which he fumbled at and barely caught, before turning on his robotic heel and walking deeper into the compound.

Sarge grunted in dissatisfaction and did his best to press the wrinkles out of the paper.

Carolina and I have decided that a small force is best for this mission. Ensure the safety of our forces until we return. - President Kimball.  
Sarge squawked indignantly. He was a crucial part of this task force!

Well, there was nothing he could do in the face of a commanding officer as strong-willed as Kimball. And the fortunes of war were nothing one lone soldier could change when his commanding officer left him on the bench.

*

Carolina was worried that she’d have to sit on Kimball to keep her from doing anything stupid the moment after they sprung the trap.

Fortunately, not only was she the larger of the two, her armor was still several tiers above Kimball’s (and maybe she’d have to look into fixing it, just when the inferiority of the Chorusan’s armor wasn’t working to her advantage). Carolina not only restrained the younger woman, but pushed her several steps back.

At least she’s gotten over her anti-Fed bias, Beta said drily.

Carolina didn’t exactly agree - distress over a colleague’s safety didn’t necessarily mean increased willingness to cooperate with said colleague - but Beta brushed the thought off in disinterest.

Cloak me.

Got it.

“Stay here,” Carolina told Kimball in a no-nonsense voice.

“Only until a fight breaks out,” Kimball shot back, though Carolina didn’t wait around for her reply.

Carolina sprinted towards the overturned and sparking train, running calculations in tandem with Beta, a strange, half-familiar feeling. One of the windows was their best bet. She barely breaked before launching into it, the image of a shattered window and a launch trajectory strangely vivid in her - their - dual mind. She touched the side of the crashed train, just barely, to ground herself.

“Doctor. Doctor, answer me.”

No mistaking that voice.

“I’m here,” Grey said, voice so unnervingly faint, uncharacteristic. “But stay back.”

There was a long pause before Locus answered. “If your armor is compromised, and you cannot contact any of your friends for aid, you might well die of exposure before getting help, Doctor.”

Grey let out a faint, high giggle. “I - I know all the tricks for surviving in all sorts of weird situations. I used to quite like adventure novels.”

“On Chorus?” Locus sounded doubtful.

“In space, too!”

“You were never this foolish before. Have you ceased to value your own survival?”

“Oh, no,” Grey said darkly. “I just learned about what you had to offer.” And she tripped the circuit, she completed the trap.

Though Carolina’s adrenaline spiked, it was fairly evident that Locus didn’t understand what was happening at first. There were sounds of movement as he tried to pry open the door - perhaps he thought that it was nothing other than a technical malfunction, and that he was saving himself and, more importantly, Grey. Beta opened the prepared Republic comm channel with a thought. “Rescue Project underway! Everyone report now!”

*

“Now what.”

Carolina threw herself back into one of the few chairs in Kimball’s office. She had a pounding headache and didn’t feel quite charitable enough to pretend that she didn’t. “I don’t know.”

Vanessa hunched her shoulders before forcing herself to relax. “Did I make the right choice?”

“I don’t think there was a right choice.”

You know he was just a tool, Beta said.

Tell that to Kimball and Grey. Tell that to everyone who lost family to the pirates.

Oh, you gonna turn yourself into the Insurrectionist’s relatives?

Carolina viciously brought to mind the image of Agent Tex’s knife sinking into Agent Connecticut's body. Beta didn’t feel half as cold as that as she should have, even contrite at all, only as cold as someone called a rude name. Carolina felt much worse.

“We don’t even have a judicial system.”

“The U.N.S.C. might want him.”

“What do they have to do with this?”

“They’re the people who should have done something. Since Wash escaped, Locus might be their only chance to string someone up.”

“Well, that’s not justice,” Vanessa said, having calmed down.

“Oh, I don’t know. Two headaches with one stone.”

Beta’s emotions on the subject felt murky. When she projected herself over Carolina’s shoulder, only Carolina’s exhaustion kept her from startling visibly. “Are we sure we want to give him up so easily?”

Vanessa made a derisive noise - Carolina knew she was uneasy around Beta, but she knew also that she wasn’t the kind to show it, and right then she had bigger worries. “I thought the point of all of this was to get rid of him.”

“Tying up loose ends,” Beta rephrased. “That might be easier if you learned what he knows about the aftermath of his whole operation.”

“Beta -” Carolina began warningly.

“The last thing I want is to hear his side of the story,” Vanessa snapped.

“Considering that you’re dealing with a war, what you want may not be what you have to do.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I was made for war.”

Carolina stayed sullen and silent, and disagreed. She remembered empty drink glasses and the vague awareness of the significance of the date, she remembered papers, schematics, on the floor, and she remembered empty hangars that had once held the supplies to feed the birth of an army. Beta hadn’t been made for war. Beta had been made from surrender.

“Should we tell General Washington?” Kimball asked, managing to turn her direction far enough away from Beta, though she ended up more looking at Carolina’s left shoulder than Carolina’s visor, to make her point.

“No,” Carolina said on impulse. She thought over her impulse, a bit worried that she was trampling over Wash’s choices and sensitivities (they were made of very different stuff and it had taken her too long to figure it out), but she still felt that it was the right one. That Beta seemed to be side-eyeing her for it within her skull didn’t discourage her any.

*

“You been down to visit the prisoner?”

Grey’s eyelids flickered as she stopped herself from looking up at Sarge. “No.”

“Why not? You put yourself on the line to nab the guy, didn’t you have a plan for afterwards?”

“See justice done? Maybe it’s not as simple as we all thought.”

“Justice?” Sarge shrugged. “Isn’t it enough justice to kick the guys who tricked you and your friends in the balls? With big guns and in-geen-ee-yous technology.”

“Yes, but now we have to do something with him.” Grey moved jerkily among the empty shelves of her hospice, checking on something; her right sleeve was pushed up to her shoulder, a thin layer of gauze slapped over an electrical burn. They were skimping on materials, but Grey hadn’t had to do so on herself. She was built on a small, light design plan, like a songbird, and hadn’t been eating enough lately besides. Sarge wondered if he could circle her arm with the fingers of his power armor.

“Firing squad? It’s in Red Team regulations for fellas like Locus.” Sarge reflected that he didn’t hate Locus, not the way he’d hated that Director fella, or Felix, and even the second had been a secondhand sort of hate. It made no difference.

She barked out a short coyote-laugh with her back turned to him. “There are many people who believe that there has been too much killing on Chorus.”

Sarge frowned to himself. “What’s the damn point of going to war if you don’t get to put the other guys six feet under? It’s not like he surrendered, and his boss wasn’t even on the damn planet to keep a gun on him.” He thought of Grif and let out a rich, rumbling laugh, almost as brief as Grey’s laughter.

“Oh, I agree,” Grey said, and he took her words at face value. Anyone would have.

*

The negotiations were not going well, and this time it wasn’t Washington’s fault.

He doubted they’d have gone well no matter what any of them did - these rebels were obviously willing to fight and kill for their Prophet - but Tucker’s ire certainly wasn’t helping. He’d come into this situation as the conquering hero, the papa wolf, and though it would look great on film, Wash was pretty sure that doing that to start with was against some rules of negotiation somewhere. (It would make sense to him if “if it makes you look like an action hero, don’t fucking do it” were one of the rules. He wasn’t sure where that left most of his … friends, even if he was pretty sure where it left him). There were calmer heads, but none that could get Tucker to listen to them. Wash set his hand on Lavernius’ elbow - Tucker shook it off with a glare, all like a Roman candle. Wash held up his hands sarcastically and started forcing his mind into that constrained, lunging space that combat demanded.

*

It was only when Tucker’s message started broadcasting that Washington realized some bonehead Sangheili had had the brilliant idea to bring their hero - or their channel to their prophetic hero, which depending on the twists of theology that Wash couldn’t guess at amounted to the same thing - online. For a pep talk, or something.

The talk was stumbling, passionate. Like a preacher, or an overwrought president. It was in a language that Washington didn’t speak, but he listened all the same, a feeling pressing at his lungs like he couldn’t afford to miss this, crouching down during a lull in a firefight. He was sweating almost as much over his friend’s spiritual reach out into battle - a fumble as likely as a victory - as from the fight.

And then at the end. Washington was near the outer edges of the compound, biofoam sealing the mess between his armor and quite possibly his tibia, still safer than he’d been through most of the firefight, no hostiles in his line of sight. They were winning.

“Agent - General Washington. Wash. Thanks for being my crutch for this, and thanks for leaving Chorus for me, and thanks for caring about Junior. Don’t get killed. I don’t want to trade one - family - part of my family - for another.”

“Captain Kaikaina Grif. You’re the bomb. Do what Wash tells you - he’s done this shit longer than either of us. We’ll do some sightseeing afterwards, yeah? Junior has the awesomest friend in you.”

Wash and Kai were not in the same unit. She’d gone to the most visually hostile-dense location, he’d flanked. Then they’d been separated, Wash ranging farther ahead. He hoped that she was safe. Let himself hope. He justified it to himself through sunk cost, even though he knew that that was officially the wrong way to go about thinking.

*

“Junior, Junior, Junior.”

Wash catalogued everything with his eyes, necessarily detached from the touching scene in front of him. In his focus for just a moment: a small aquamarine figure engulfed by the limbs of an unusually colored Elite, both of them babbling to the other in a mixture of English and the alien’s language. In his focus longer: a room small by Sangheili standards, white walls, no windows, one door (Wash and Kaikaina standing in it), its obvious utility as a cell unsuccessfully plastered over with gifts of food and clothing and other things, some identifiable to Wash, some not, much of it having a repeating icon on it somewhere. Something to do with his Prophethood? Junior seemed to be in good shape. Tucker didn’t seem to be content with just that, though.

Tucker turned back to his human friends without extricating himself from his son’s arms. “Are we clear?”

“You speak this army’s language,” Wash said, a little terse, I don’t, at the same time as Kai said, “Yeah. Let’s go.”

*

“I need to speak to your President,” the hulking prisoner said, not exactly breaking his silence - he’d been saying the exact same thing for hours, but nothing else.

“Like hell you do,” Sarge replied. Earlier, he’d tried to get a rise out of the man, but it hadn’t worked; as a result of bashing his monster baiting skills against that particular brick wall, he’d just found them both playing this bit back and forth like a broken vid recorder.

“No luck, S - General?”

Sarge turned towards the interloper, taking a moment to place the voice. He felt no guilt over that.

Purple armor. Glaring, basic, all the way purple armor. Was it Doc or O’Malley out to play today? Sarge wasn’t a fan of either prospect.

“Nope,” Sarge huffed, throwing out his chest to assert dominance. “He’s just been trying to cause trouble.”

“Really? What does he want?”

Sarge had a biting retort all ready when Locus cut in with, “I want to warn the citizens of Chorus -”

“What about?” Sarge snapped. “In case you didn’t notice, Green One, your partner’s not threatening anyone but the worms anymore and your boss is in the same boat. You’re not /relevant/ anymore.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Doc hedged. “He has news, right?”

“Indeed,” Locus rumbled.

“Why in Sam Hill do we care?”

“Because this planet is relying on you.” Locus grabbed at his bars, and held on as the force field sparked into life, zippering around his gauntlets. If Sarge were a different man, he might be intimidated. Doc didn’t seem phased either.

“Why haven’t you told the General what you have to say?”

Locus let go, the force propelling him backwards a step. “Two reasons. One. I did not expect the General to deliver my message himself -”

“Of course -”

“Two. I don’t intend to stay in this cell.”

Sarge was about ready to see if the butt of his rifle would fit between the bars of Locus’ cage, when Doc shuffled closer and said, in a voice not like Doc at all, “What’s so bad about our guest room? Remind you of your old home life, hah?”

Locus stared at O’Malley.

“Anyway,” Sarge said. “Doc, go bother Donut.”

“I am not Doc,” O’Malley said. “I can bother who I please!”

“I don’t give a damn which one of you is talking right now, you’re both a major pain in the tookus. Now leave before I make you leave.”

O’Malley crossed his arms. Sarge didn’t like being out-drama’ed, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. “I will leave, and then I will bring the other fools down here to listen to Locus! It shall be entertaining!”

“I really hate you,” Sarge said.

*

“What the fuck, Doc,” Carolina said, for the sixth time in about as many minutes.

O’Malley cackled. “I have inconvenienced everyone and will now force this fool to reveal his plans!”

Carolina kept very still. No one present could see inside her helmet since Epsilon’s departure, but Sarge felt sure that she was sighing, or rolling her eyes, or closing them very slowly in exasperation - something like that. “Sarge,” she said, voice tense as a waiting tiger. “Why is Doc - sorry, Beta, O’Malley - why is O’Malley here?”

“I tried to run him out, but the damn thing’s conniving.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“Diabolical!”

“Alright, Diabolical,” she turned to O’Malley, “what’s the plot?”

O’Malley swung his helmet down and towards Locus. Locus had by far had the least nameable signs of exasperation, and by that rose out of his cage to be the most well-off person there. “You need to know,” Locus said, “but I need a guarantee first.”

“I don’t make those kinds of deals,” she snarled.

Washington and forty-seven-niner did, Beta commented too nonchalantly not to care. Well, they were behind bars in this situation. At her unformed question, stumble of logic.

Washington is a good man in a bad situation.

And forty-seven isn’t? Beta asked in the same synapse-flash that she said, Don’t be so quick to judge. You hadn’t seen him for a long time, not until you were having your crusade.

Fucking A.I.s.

“You don’t understand what I’ll do to get my chance at freedom,” Locus said, somehow wilting intentionally, and it helped in no way for her to see him the way he obviously wanted her to. Unlucky him.

“Somehow I doubt it’ll top genocide, though that’s a right impressive gambit,” Sarge said.

“Ooh, let’s find out,” O’Malley said.

Carolina thought of contacting Wash; it was easy to think of Locus as an open book, but the important parts, the important parts for connecting with him or controlling him, were hidden by the rest of him. She could feel Beta’s prompting behind that thought. She dismissed it; Wash had his mission, he didn’t need any distractions.

Carolina leveled what she thought of as her best glare at Locus’ slightly twisted form. “I’m not making a deal with you. You’re not getting to these people through me.” She wondered if he understood, what she was offering, too.

She turned on her heel and left.

*

After Doc switched places with O’Malley and Sarge chased him off to go “psychoanalyze the enemy” (presumably the Blue army, or his lingering conception of them), and then Sarge followed him to check up on “his” Generals (despite officially having the same rank as Donut and Simmons) and probably reprimand Doc for something, Locus pried open a panel on his armor’s forearm. He considered the panel. He sighed, and tapped a button. Then he shut the panel, trying to deliberately jam it.

*

“What was the disturbance in the cells?” Kimball asked, unexpectedly, over Carolina’s comm.

“A certain someone trying to wiggle out of the consequences of his actions.”

He’s probably going to blunt-force it, considering that that’s what most supersoldiers do when they don’t like their situation.

Despite what Locus may think, he is not in fact a mutant or some other kind of superhuman, Carolina thought back. He doesn’t even have an AI.

I think the danger is more what he thinks he can do. And, shit, who’s to say he’s wrong?

“In any way that matters?”

“No.”

*

Tucker and Junior were deep in conversation on the shuttle ride back to the planet’s surface. It had started with an ecstatic tone, but quickly became somber. Wash had been napping, quickly falling behind on Kai’s interrogation over his exact behavior and any “cool moments” in battle. She’d settled next to him and was inspecting his armor for blood splatter and damage. He found this surprisingly easy to ignore.

He woke up somewhere about halfway through the trip to find Kai asleep on his shoulder. Junior was also asleep, curled in on himself. Tucker was frowning at the shuttle wall. 

“Are you OK?”

“As good as anyone would be. I mean, Junior’s fine. But every time you get rid of one asshole an even worse one pops up. Just look at that douchewad Hargrove.”

“It does seem that way,” Washington agreed. “After all, look at what happened the first time we got rid of the Director.” He smiled bleakly and pointed at himself, careful not to jostle Kai.

Tucker smiled at him, softly. It was not a smile that Wash had seen him give anyone else, although it was relatively close in nature to the smiles he gave his son. “Trying to get your team killed is just the initiation rite for Blood Gulch, dude.”

“I still miss Maine.”

“Why?”

“We were friends, back in the Freelancer days. He wasn’t a very friendly guy, but he took every member of the team seriously, even me, and he was a good teammate to have at your back. Not to mention that he never cared about the Leaderboard. He just cared about his team. And good steak. He cared about good steak. And his knifle.”

“At least the knifle is in good hands now?”

“Thanks. But yeah, I actually am glad that Grif stole it so that the U.N.S.C. didn’t.”

“Good, because he’s still kinda worried that you’re going to kill the entire Red team and declare yourself the Blood Gulch Dictator, even if us Blues get to be spared as your minions.”

“Lavernius, you already are my minion.”

Tucker’s eyebrows rose. “And who led this last mission, exactly?”

“Want to compare kills?”

“No.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Well, you did a really good job, and I’m proud of you.”

“Alright, Walking Motivational Poster. Anyway, I’m kind of OK with being your minion.”

“More shirking leadership duties? Or do you secretly like my training from hell?”

Tucker gave him a grin that was neither sentimental nor soft.

Wash looked at the wall. “I think there was something I actually wanted to talk about.”

“Green dicks,” Kaikaina said. Wash looked at her. She appeared to still be asleep.

“Not that,” Wash said. “That sounds unhygienic.”

“Yeah, a green dick is a bad sign,” Tucker said. “Like, if you have a green dick you should probably talk to Dr. Grey, even if she’s terrifying.”

“I think it was about the Sangheili.”

Tucker sobered. “What about them?”

“I doubt the faction that made trouble this time was all back there.”

“Yeah, probably not.”

“So. Junior might be more safe in U.N.S.C. space.”

“I know, I wish he could just be a normal half-alien kid but he wants to help his people after the whole … war thing … but I still think he’s taking on too much. Hell, he doesn’t even have his high school diploma yet!”

Wash couldn’t help but smile. “I think I agree with you on the doing too much thing. Maybe he could stay with Uncle Grif and take some online courses.”

Tucker didn’t object to the implied familiarity between himself and the former Red soldier. “Grif? I don’t want to expose a young man to that level of apathy and underappreciation of fashion and basic hygiene.”

“Yes, but Grif is very, very good at not being found. By anyone. You know how I ignored Sarge when he tried to hire me to assassinate him? Well, Simmons couldn’t find him for a couple days and since I didn’t want him fixating on me instead, I actually tried to find Grif … a couple days after that Lopez found him inside a fake robot chassis. Or maybe Lopez knew earlier and only went and got Sarge when he needed the parts … Anyway, I thought that was pretty clever.”

Tucker laughed. “Did Simmons cry?”

“Yes. It was very uncomfortable.”

Tucker shrugged. “I just think that guy needs better friends. Although then I might see Grif cry, and that would be way more disturbing because he doesn’t care about anything except food.”

“We could call Phuong and smuggle us all out of here.”

“Dude, yeah, let’s do this.”

Wash assumed that Phuong had her comm on her. No one from PFL could avoid that kind of paranoia.

*

They were met at the shuttleport by Phuong, yes, and quite a few Sangheili. Wash moved to stand himself and Tucker and Kai back from the converging nucleus of the two crowds. Wash’s hand moved to hover near his commlink, but he didn’t quite activate it. He didn’t like how Phuong was standing. Tucker shouldered his way past Wash, and Wash let him.

“Phuong! What’s with the welcoming party?”

“Well, you are triumphant war heroes.”

Wash scoffed.

“Look, roadstripe, that was about as much of a war as we signed up for with the Director fiasco.”

“No, the Director thing was a lot less necessary.”

“So, you were just so excited to get back to the frontlines that you arranged this little party?” Tucker asked with foxglove sweetness.

“Sorry, this isn’t much of a party. But I could give recommendations for next time,” Kai said, unconcerned by the goings-on.

“No, numbnuts, the Sangheili were the ones tickled pink.”

And because Tucker was a clever man, he caught on.

“Alright. Just wanted to make sure. Although Wash is a boring butt, since he’s my friend, I have to protect him from any unpleasant surprises, you know?”

Phuong kept eye contact a moment too long. “I’m glad to hear it.”

*

By unspoken agreement, none of the humans let on that anything was up, down, or that they thought that anything was up, down. They just kept up diplomatic relations for the transport back to the capital. Although Tucker was careful to stay next to Junior, and Wash was careful to stay next to Tucker. That Kai was careful to stay next to Phuong probably just meant that she was happy to see the fourth member of their little group. 

Phuong seemed to appreciate it.

*

“Bitters, I heard you have a report?” General Donut asked cheerfully. They were conversing by screen, as Bitters was still out on patrol - Bitters was not at the moment very concerned with stealth, but there hadn’t been any reason lately to bother with stealth; Locus had been an official reason to bother with stealth, but most of the Chorusans had taken a fatalistic approach to that threat. Either Locus would nab them or he wouldn’t. Expending the extra effort would just have been counterproductive. And arguably they were right, since the team that had captured him consisted of none of the rank and file. General Donut thought that this demonstrated a regrettable lack of self-confidence - how could they ever emulate their heroes unless they believed in themselves? There was no trace of deception in this belief. He really did admire what the Republic had done. Well, probably not the killing people part, but often that was just a part of life, like running into a table or buying the wrong conditioner (or requisitioning the wrong conditioner).

“Yeah, something’s weird around one of the towers … I withdrew all the patrols to a tighter perimeter and threw a remote camera in the general area of disturbance. We should get some live feed, although I have to talk to Jensen about that … I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”

“Great initiative, Bitters! I could really use a man like you closer to me on the force to get more action. But that atti-”

“Er, yeah. Anyway I’m going to go on patrol more so that I don’t have to talk to anyone. Maybe get in touch with Captain Jensen.”

“Captain Jensen? Clever girl, but terrible fashion sense, and her energy is just so -”

Bitters hung up.

*

“I need the captain!”

“Which captain?” Simmons asked.

“Jensen!”

“Oh, thank god.”

“Simmons, I thought you liked Jensen? Aren’t you jealous?”

“Not even kind of.”

“Wait! You admitted to liking Jensen! Ooh! Have you told Grif?”

“Why would I tell Grif?”

“Because. You know.”

“Know what?”

“It’s something you two should talk about.”

“Look, man, the lard-bucket decided that he could off and desert already. Why would I want to talk to him in my spare time?”

“Because it’s the basis of a healthy relationship, and you need a healthy life balance. Which I don’t think you have. Unless you spend a lot of your time really personally, which isn’t my business, but is a great stress reliever!”

“Christ, Donut, just go find Jensen.”

*

Captain Jensen was fixing a warthog with Lopez’s help.

“Buenos dias! Don’t let me distract you, carry on. Jensen! Bitters sent me some technobabble and I need your help!”

Jensen dropped a wrench and sent it skittering across the floor (Lopez grabbed it and set it down in a stationary position). [“Maybe you should ask me, but of course you would think I was telling you to make a potato circuit or cheering you on idiotically,” Lopez said.]

“Uh, you shure, Donuth? I’m prethy shure thath Lopez would be bether ath this -”

“Aw, that’s nice of you to say, but don’t have to worry about his feelings, Jensen, he’s a robot and he doesn’t have any.”

[“Fortunately for all of you, that is true. More or less. Annoyance is a feeling.”]

“You do a really good job of being friendly anyway, Lopez!”

[“You are an idiot.”]

“Anyway, wath do you wanth help with?”

“Bitters want us to decode a message from a camera he left in the field.”

*

At first the feed from the camera was very boring, which was predictable. Donut fidgeted with his helm feed, flipping between status updates for the colony and Cosmopolitan, which, while a venerable publication, was still often on the forefront of lifestyle advice. Jensen managed to keep her concentration steady, though, which was admirable of her, while listing off some of the native flora and fauna, which was nerdy of her. Donut wasn’t quite sure that all of the names were properly scientific, though, including specimens such as the Teapot Hammerhead and the Purple Vulva (the last was a butterfly with an interesting wing silhouette). Lopez had wandered off.

And then something human-sized and grey and unsettling lurched out of the underbrush and tried to grab the Teapot Hammerhead - for a moment it looked that the small hexaped was doomed to this abrupt and unexpected predation, but it escaped into a crack in a tree just in time.

“Well, that almost ended badly,” Donut said with a gusty sigh.

“Wath the fuck ith thath.”

“You know, I don’t know. Uhm. Maybe I should call Sarge?”

When she didn’t respond, apparently still looking to him for guidance, he called Sarge.

*

“Well good goddamn, son, what are you doing just sitting there? Call the President! Call the Freelancers! Call the U.N.S.C.! Call the Terminator!”

*

When he called Kimball, she said, “Well, prepare a communique for the UNSC. I need to talk to someone.”

“Who?”

She sighed. “Locus.”

“Locus? I know he seemed really competent and helpful when I was still, uh, you know, helping Doyle, with all of that, but after everything that happened, I think he’s a little shady, you know?”

She sighed again. “I know, and he might just be baiting us, but - call Sarge to my office, please?”

Donut did without complaint.

*

“You seem less composed than usual,” Locus said.

“Might be,” Carolina said. “Having a friend come back to life is a little - surprising.”

Locus hummed in agreement. “Sometimes it’s better if they just stay dead.”

“You know, I used to think that about the dem Blues,” Sarge said, “but having them come back all the time has made me a General, so I guess as I can’t complain. After all, I can always use my new rank to oust traitorous Blues from our ranks!”

“I need to ask you - do you think I’m a Blue?”

“Look at your armor, woman! You’re ‘bout as Blue as they get, though I admit that your cyan-ish compatriot is not a half bad soldier, as far as Blues go. Certainly better than Grif. An’ what else would I consider you?”

“A Freelancer?”

“Freelancers are even worse than them dirty blues.”

“Point taken.”

“You may all just be dead soldiers very soon,” Locus said.

Carolina snorted inelegantly. “What else is new?” She hoped that she’d never sounded that dramatic. But he reminded her of someone. Someone familiar? She couldn’t place it.

*

“Locus.”

“Yep,” Sarge said.

“You wanted to talk,” Kimball said, “now talk.” Ignoring Sarge.

“You might have noticed that there are new antagonists on the horizon for Chorus.”

“Yes.” Kimball shut her eyes, very briefly. “I’ve put in a call to the U.N.S.C.”

“If you did, you didn’t tell the full truth. You want your planet to remain habitable.”

“So selfish of them, after you tried so hard to make it a nice inoffensive space rock,” Carolina said.

“I know where the antagonists are coming from.”

“And you want a pardon?” Kimball asked.

“Not from the U.N.S.C. And I don’t care what my files say. But I want to help, and I want to stop being hunted by your soldiers. Someone might get hurt.”

Carolina patted him on the shoulder, condescendingly.

“If you want to help, you have to follow the rules.”

“Shouldn’t be that hard, you followed your buddy pretty well until we killed him,” Sarge said.

Kimball shot him an annoyed glare.

“You’d do better to let me take the lead as the better soldier.”

“No, you’re not a leader, and I’m not putting you above people who you were willing to massacre - even if you were following orders. There’s more to being a leader than that.”

“I did well by my soldiers,” Locus said, finally quiet.

“No, you didn’t,” Kimball replied, almost gentle.

Carolina stared at the wall.

“Sure sounds ta me like we’re starting negotiatin’,” Sarge said.

“Yes. I figure you’re desperate enough to trust in this arena, at least,” Kimball said.

Locus didn’t say anything, but no one in the room expected him to turn her down.

“Does he need a chaperone?” Sarge asked.

“Lopez will install monitors in his armor.”

Locus twitched.

“We’re not going to force you to do this,” Kimball said. “And I haven’t decided yet whether or not I’ll let the U.N.S.C. have you if they ask for you. But if you want out of your cell and onto the battlefield, or wherever it is you think we need to go, this is the only way.”

*

One of the Sangheili diplomats entered the living room of their small suite without knocking. Wash wasn’t sure if the not knocking was a cultural difference in manners, a show of lack of respect or just one of those things. He was cleaning his armor on a canvas he’d requested on the floor and didn’t look up.

Tucker said something in Sangheili.

Caboose said, “Are we having ice cream tonight? Because we did really well killing those other aliens that look like you.”

“Caboose,” Tucker said wearily.

“I think we’re entitled to a little ice cream,” Wash said from the floor. Upon reflection, he didn’t remember the last time he’d had ice cream; but he remembered that he’d liked it, as he liked most sweet things.

“I’ll … look into getting us ice cream,” Tucker said, long-suffering but not succeeding at hiding the affection in his voice from Wash. Wash smiled to himself.

“Hell yeah,” Kai said from her room; Wash thought that she’d been sleeping, but maybe she slept light, like most of them did.

Tucker sat on one of the benches next to Wash, just inside of his field of vision. A faint sizzle sounded and a glow descended on his feet; he was playing some sort of hologram.

“General Tucker,” Carolina said.

“Lina? Surprised to hear back from you,” Tucker said, sounding vaguely pissy.

“Look, I know I left kind of abruptly, but we have a situation here.”

“Did Locus show back up?”

“Uh, yes. Grey and I caught him, but there was a Flood -”

“What?” Wash demanded, holding a greave so hard that the bones of his hand felt it.

“One - node of the Flood. One individual. We’ve managed to bait it out of the way of any structures -”

“Thank god.”

“But Locus says that Hargrove was looking into using that and about everything else in the galaxy as a potential bioweapon, which really shouldn’t surprise me, so we’re going to use him to track it down.”

“Which might backfire spectacularly,” Wash pointed out.

“I am aware of that, but I also think I can take him.” Carolina let her voice go a little smug. “After all, I helped capture him in the first place. It was a small team.”

“Let’s hope that goes that much further to taking down that fucker’s ego,” Tucker said.

“Hey! Getting taken out by me is a privilege, thank you very much.”

Tucker laughed, audibly letting go of some of his resentment. “Yeah, I guess. That means I’ve insulted a lot of bad guys in my day, and I’m OK with that.”

“I’m going to send some info for you guys, in case anything goes bad. Do you have anyone with decoding talent there? Sorry, Wash, but I’ve seen you with computers.”

“Is it like cars?” Caboose asked.

“Worse,” Wash said tersely.

Tucker ducked his head and raised an eyebrow at Wash, perhaps catching on to the double meaning. “Actually, Phuong just left to talk with one of our … hosts.”

“I don’t - know that we can trust her. Wash.”

“Hey, look, don’t get on Wash’s case about this - we need him to be less prone to shooting teammates, not more.”

“Thanks, guys,” Wash said sarcastically.

Neither apologized.

“Well, I don’t think I’ll have any problem keeping her away from her former boss’ assets,” Tucker said.

“We’ll work on getting back to Chorus,” Wash said.

“Just look out for them there, Wash. Either Kimball and I have this one, or we’ll all need to be nuked from orbit anyway.”

“That’s not funny,” Tucker said.

“Aw, you do care.”

“Look, I left all of my best magazines under my bunk, I’m pretty sure that shit’s flammable.”

Wash gave Tucker a warmly unconvinced look. Tucker rolled his eyes.

“Is Kaikaina there?” Carolina asked.

“No? Hey, Kai!”

“What?!”

“Carolina -”

“Oh, nothing,” Carolina said faux-innocently.

Tucker furrowed his eyebrows at her holo-image. “Alllright. But I’m stealing your armor if you die. And I’m definitely tracking down your embarrassing highschool pictures if Grif dies.”

“How would you even fit in my armor?”

“I have my ways.”

“Sure you do. Anyway, I should get back to work.”

Kai emerged from her room in her pyjamas, which she had somehow requisitioned from their hosts. “Who’d I miss?”

“Carolina,” Tucker said.

“Aww.”

Phuong ducked back into the room. “Uh, Lavernius, how’s your statecraft been lately?”

He gave her a blank look. “My whoodawhatnow?”

She gave a wide, awkward smile. “Our hosts are also going to be hosting a huge conference regarding what to do with your son. Good luck?”  
“Good luck to all of us, ‘cause no way are any of you people leaving this to me.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Wash protested. “I shoot people. I shot at a lot of them.”

Kai struck a pose. “We got this far!”

Tucker slapped a hand over his eyes in exaggerated exhaustion. “That we have.”

*

Carolina was still mildly surprised that Wash and Phuong had agreed to stand back so readily - Tucker had his son to consider, and while no coward was rarely interested in conflict, but it was a little out of character for the other former Freelancers - or Freelancer employees, at least.  
No surprise that Kimball somehow picked up on it. “You’re concerned about General Tucker and the rest?”

“No.”

Kimball crossed her arms at her. It was interesting how people who spent years in power armor began telegraphing through body language; it was a useful shorthand, in Carolina’s mind; she’d never been an excellent speaker, through words or the shifting masks of expression. Kimball hadn’t lost that; she had a deft hand with other people.

Carolina shrugged. “I’m relieved that they’re out of the way. I’m just kind of surprised that they didn’t argue more about it.”

Kimball smiled. “You’re worried that they’re not going to have your back.”

“No! Wash will always be a good squadmate. And Tucker does care. And a leader has certain responsibilities.”

Kimball hadn’t stopped smiling. “But you’re not one of the Generals. You’re still going back to U.N.S.C. space, and you feel like they’re already forgetting what it was like to be part of your team.”

“It won’t get in the way of my work here. I’m not bitter.”

“Would you really say that if you were trying to convince anyone?”

“You already seem to know what I’m thinking before I am. I’m not used to it.”

“I was part of the Rebel medical unit, for a little bit. It was much larger back then.”

“I can’t imagine you in the same job as Grey.”

Kimball smiled tightly. “It can be a humbling reminder; I heard that we’re not that different from Doyle enough.”

“But you’re still not happy about it.”

“No. I might never be.”

“But you’re still going to serve all of these people?”

Kimball sat on a nearby crate, leaving Carolina standing. “You could have disappeared after the business with the Director.”

“If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been trying. I didn’t crash our ship on your planet; in fact I think I’m one of your only heroes who didn’t - though I wouldn’t put it past … Epsilon.”

Kimball hugged her arms to herself and looked to the side. “I think there’s still more to this life for me than the great unknown. Especially since you - and your friends - came here.”

Carolina looked to the other side, face heating up. “I don’t know about my life. I usually know what I want, but all I can think is that I don’t want - this.” She gestured with her right hand at some of the supply crates; those for firearms, specifically.

“You should have had a better commander.”

“Well, it’s up to me now.”

“I’ll still be here. But these crates need to get out of here; specifically to the Jeeps.”

Carolina gave a very short laugh and bent to pick up one of the general supply crates. “Of course.”

*

“I want to go with you,” Kimball told the people who’d already started to gather in the motor pool.

“And we want you to come with us!” Donut replied. “It could be like a picnic.”

Kimball smiled at him, but the quirk of her eyebrows said that she wasn’t sure why he was being sent out, either.

“You know why you can’t,” Locus said.

She didn’t bother with the death threat. If anything happened, well - things had been going better long enough that her hands had got a little loose on the reigns. Chorus wasn’t shooting any ships out of the sky. They could, and would, leave if things turned too sour.

Carolina looked perilously close to shouldering Locus a few feet away from her. Donut managed to intercept the barrel of Sarge’s shotgun with his own rifle before he could, what looked like, shoot Locus in the kneecap. It all made Kimball feel better about letting Locus out of his cage. Maybe her moral dilemma would end up ended and solve himself for her.

“I’m still so sad that Griff couldn’t join us,” Donut bemoaned. “Family is great and all; I miss my - hey, wait, can I get a vacation to go visit my grandma? I’m not sure that she knows I’m not dead. She doesn’t really use the net much.”

“I thought Grif had just retired,” Carolina said, starting to sound suspicious.

“Well, yeah,” Donut said. “But he could still pitch in like a hardworking, brawny soldier if he wanted to, he’s on the planet. Or he would be, if he wasn’t planning a super secret super fun vacation without us!”

Before Carolina could react to that, Kimball said - “You mentioned family earlier. Do you mean that he’s going to go visit Captain Kaikaina?”

“Of course! If he has any other family, he doesn’t really talk about them - well, except when Doc gets super mean. But, you know, we try to pretend that we didn’t hear that, except when we really need him to tell us what he heard in the mess hall or clean the dormitories.”

“Damn it, I didn’t sign his leave! I’ll … I’ll have to think of a particularly apt punishment.”

“If he’d asked you to sign, he knows that you wouldn’t have,” Carolina said, actually sounding amused. Kimball was a bit surprised by that.

Kimball looked at Carolina, Significantly, for a long moment, before Carolina trained her visor back on her and shrugged. “I can’t technically say that what Grif did is illegal,” Kimball said, “since he’s not part of my army anymore. But I’m definitely, definitely drafting a memo saying that no one can travel to Sangheili space until the mess with Tucker’s son is sorted out. Dammit. He should have known better.”

“Oh, I’m sure he does,” Donut says. “I just don’t think he cares. Don’t feel bad about that, though. He doesn’t really care about most things. Sadly. What a way to live.”

“What a way to die,” Sarge grumbled, ominously.

“If you set Lopez to sabotage whatever Grif is doing somehow,” Kimball said, “I will remove your commission.”

Sarge subsided.

Alongside his shotgun and the closest thing that Chorus could fabricate to continental breakfasts, Sarge cared about his commission. He’d even gotten a little teary-eyed about it in an understated bonding moment with Wash a while back, not that anyone but Tucker knew about that.

*

Carolina wasn’t really comfortable with Beta setting up shop in Locus’ suit, but she knew better than to say so; and even aside from her inarguably complicated relationship with the A.I., it really was a solid tactical decision. If they could trust Beta. Carolina felt guilty feeling that way; after all she remembered her own original allegiances even if sometimes she thought she didn’t, strictly speaking, need to; that she could forget already. But Beta didn’t have Conneticut anymore, and she didn’t have York anymore, or the hope of Epsilon; and she didn’t have the Director’s death anymore. And she wasn’t fuzzy. Most of them weren’t fuzzy. But with Beta it was even different than with Omega - O’Malley - whatever. She was a little bit like Lopez, except without the nihilistic Stoic amusement thing.

And Locus didn’t have anything anymore, and still thought that he could be OK. Or he was acting like he thought he could be OK. Other people did that, apparently. Wash did.

Yeah, Carolina was worried. But maybe not as worried as she’d be if Locus wasn’t keeping up his sparse commentary on their mission.

“You’re glad that the president is keeping the captains close to home,” Carolina said, voice going dangerously light. “It’s not very conducive for you integrating with Chorus to boast about how you kicked their asses.” Credit where credit’s due; she couldn’t think of a different way to phrase it.

“I wasn’t boasting. I was offering tactical advice on the battlefield.”

“Well, it’s not a battlefield anymore.”

“It could be.”

“They know that.”

“Do they?” Really?

“Yes. I doubt that you enlisted because you were a well-adjusted kid.” Carolina didn’t imagine most people as well-adjusted at any time. She knew it was because of herself. Yet she could somehow imagine Locus as an entirely average person with an excessive film habit, and felt resigned sympathy for this figment. Maybe because who he was sat so ill on him. Even more than it was like with Wash. It was like the Director.

She saw this thought and, immediately, looked away from it.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“You have to find something that does that isn’t a genocidal partner. I’d suggest the integrity of this nation.”

“I can see why Kimball wants to keep you.”

She stared at him for an uncomfortable moment. “So can I.”

This time she let him take the lead, just for a moment, watching him and taking some tired satisfaction in how much he didn’t fit in.

*

It was just going to be Phuong and Tucker present in discussions, which obviously meant that only they were invited to participate in the discussions, but neither Kai nor Wash gave a second thought to breaking rules anymore, a similarity that Wash noted with a sort of detached pleasure. As Phuong and Tucker were shuffled out of the room by a couple of Sangheili that Wash thought he’d seen around the building, compound, or hotel, Phuong acted completely composed but Tucker shot Wash an anxious look - Wash lifted his hand just slightly in acknowledgement, bearing the frisson of eye-to-eye discomfort for the small gesture. He wanted to grab his hand instead. It was one of the visceral pleasures of power armor, even if he didn’t tend to indulge himself - the force imparted by presence without concern for the supposedly neutral politics of bodies in space.

Kai watched them go with a stony expression. The moment they - Tucker and Phuong and their escorts - were out of sight from all angles inside of the room, she told Wash without really turning to him, “At least the Sangheili are more fun than UNSC officers. They don’t yell at us as much. And it’s not as important as what Grif used to do - I mean, he’d never leave me at home with so many friends. He was a little uptight like that. But it can get a little lame to get left behind all the time.”

Vaguely aware of Grif’s personal history, all Wash could say was, “Indeed.”

“I can tell that you don’t really like it either. How do you deal with it? I mean, you don’t seem to have a lot of fun while waiting around for Carol or Vanessa to tell you what to do.”

“I think that Washingtub thinks about how to help us not die and also he talks to robots in his head like I do sometimes,” Caboose said from his room, where he’d taken his helmet off (actually Kai had helped him remove it while Wash was lost in the rhythm of cleaning his guns) and now appeared to be playing some sort of game on its visor.

“I, uh. I don’t have any AI in my head anymore.”

“That is sad.”

“Sure.”

“Well yay! We’re not dead yet! But that still doesn’t sound very fun, even if you still had robots in your head.”

“What do you think I should do instead?”

Kai raised both eyebrows. Apparently she, like most of humanity except for South and York (and Simmons), was incapable of raising either of them independently. “More like who you should be doing.”

“Uh.” Was she flirting with him? He didn’t think she was flirting with him. He didn’t think that he wanted her to be flirting with him, although he wasn’t entirely sure. If nothing else he was feeling increasingly comfortable around her, and she had never exactly been threatening.

“Oh, come on. No one’s going to make fun of you for having feelings.”

“Sure they aren’t,” he said, sarcastically.

“Well, maybe they will. But I don’t see how that really matters when we’re getting shot at every goddamn day.”

“Maybe I deal better with getting shot at.”

“Then you’re weird, weirdo.”

“When are we joining Tucker and the aliens for the very important things?” Caboose asked suddenly.

“We’re not?” Kai asked.

“But Tucker needs our help because he cannot do things on his own or it will go to his large head,” Caboose explained, patiently.

Kai grinned at Wash. “It sounds like we’re going to go help my boyfriend.”

“How?” Wash asked.

Caboose swiveled his helmet in his hands so that it faced Kai and Wash. Surprisingly sophisticated-looking code covered the visor, along with a couple of digital windows into empty corridors in the compound. “We can tell him things through this.”

“Is it on - is it listening right now?” Wash asked, sounding alarmed.

“I do not think so.”

“How are we going to use it?” Kai asked.

“How private is that radio?” Wash asked.

“I do not know if other people can find it but I think that they just do not care,” Caboose said.

Wash was relieved. Stealth through irrelevance was, practically, superior.

*

They passed the temple of destruction. Sarge enjoyed himself, charging around and over boulders - Carolina felt tense trying to keep an eye both on him while he passed too close to the edge of the pit and Locus kept to their outside. She’d have preferred him next to the pit.

She let him take the lead again. Donut suggested a picnic as the day got long over the badlands of Chorus, the way ahead clear to the naked eye with sunlight laying down over miles of red and purple stone and grit unobstructed by much more than small towers of the same geology rearing up like ambitious sandcastles on an endless shore. His wheedling was a welcome change from his earlier and somewhat pointless attempt at playing “I Spy” (Sarge had joined in with endearing enthusiasm but that hadn’t made up for the complete lack of things to spy in this terrain).

Carolina remained silent. She found herself enjoying this stretch of the journey - in some way it reminded her of riding her grandfather’s horses in the scrublands of Texas. Locus also remained silent. She assumed that this was tact.

*

Locus stopped about a half mile from a short cliff ahead of them. Sarge, who’d been trying to get Donut to resume I Spy now that there was at least one individual phenomenon to spy, tried to come to a stop in time, but managed to clip the end of Locus’ vehicle and send it and him toppling over (his own vehicle veered towards the cliff, but somehow the old man jumped off neatly if not elegantly, and the vehicle petered out obediently before hitting the cliff-face). Locus kicked his own vehicle off of him and started to stalk towards Sarge; Carolina lunged forward and grabbed his near arm. Locus froze.

“He didn’t mean it,” Donut said.

Sarge turned his helmet towards Donut. “Do not show weakness in the face of the enemy, boy.”

“I think a little solidarity is in order right now,” Carolina said, wondering if she could promote Donut.

“I am not sure,” Locus said, “how you’ve managed to lead anyone without them deserting.”

Donut gave a high, fake laugh.

“They respect my moral fibre and good upbringing,” Sarge said.

“He has his own vision of leadership,” Carolina said. There was a lot more it’d be helpful to say, but while Sarge was incapable of noticing his subordinate’s sarcasm and veiled disrespect, it wouldn’t do her any good to ignore how his temper flared when someone insulted him to his face.  
Pity she couldn’t get Locus alone, now.

Locus shrugged Carolina’s hand off, but in a slow motion that seemed to say he’d calmed down. “We’re here,” he said, and walked towards the cliff.

Donut shrugged at Carolina before following. Sarge gave her what seemed to be a commiserating shoulder-slope and waited for her to lead.  
Locus approached the cliff and ahead of him, without prompting, a long thin shadow solidified into a seam and retreated into the cliff; the harsh pink of whatever synthetic material they’d seen around the Temple of Destruction showing as the seam retreated and widened. The seam became wide enough for three people, shoulder to shoulder. Donut disappeared ahead of Locus.

Carolina was grateful that Tucker wasn’t there as she followed them into the pink tunnel. She was a little uncomfortable with it herself, tracing shipment lists and patrol routes in her mind to stop herself thinking of - other things. And then thinking of guns and ships in defense.

“Man, this is some really interesting interior decorating, but it gets kind of claustrophobic, don’t you think?”

They soon approached a steel door partially concealed by the uneven architecture of the place, and it too slid open at Locus’ approach. The corridor beyond was geometric and glacial white. It reminded her uncomfortably of the Mother of Invention, the medical parts of it. The air smelled cold, even though it was room temperature. Although they could see a bend in the corridor ahead of them, Locus stopped; a moment later part of the wall receded into the shape of a doorway and then disappeared ahead of a steel room. The cold air reached out and minorly adjusted the readings on their visors.

The room looked an awful lot like a morgue.

“I don’t think Chorus is going to volunteer to clean this up,” Carolina said, thinking that this place was for fallen pirates.

“Probably not,” Locus agreed. “But I think this could benefit you, particularly.”

“Why?” Carolina asked, wary.

Locus went to one of the slots and rolled it out while everyone brought their guns up to train on him. White mist roiled up. Cryo. The person inside was obscured for a long moment, and remained so while Locus punched in some numbers on a thin console just above the aperture.

“Anyone I know?” Carolina asked. “Scarface?”

“Not Scarface.”

“Felix?” Carolina asked slowly, alarmed.

Locus paused. “Not him either.”

Carolina moved her sight onto the figure’s obscured forehead. Donut crowded closer, only temporarily obscuring her line of sight.

“Get back here, boy, you’re in the way of my shotgun.”

Donut ignored Sarge.

Carolina twitched all along her right when Beta reappeared as a voice in her head. One, one, one. Counting along to her breathing.  
It seemed like a long time passed in the moments but when a face finally appeared in details from cryo, reminding her somehow of vintage CGI from the shows that the Director had loved during her childhood, Carolina felt exhaustion slap her like an ocean wave.

Maybe Chorus had never made sense, but her life before Chorus had made sense, terrible sense, since the moment the Meta left her for dead. And save for a handful of people - Epsilon, Beta, Washington - those two lives were insular from each other.

“You know,” Donut said, “Locus is doing that thing where dramatic background music should be playing, but I gotta tell you, I am not impressed. Are we supposed to be impressed?”

“She’s a freelancer,” Carolina said.

“Oh,” Sarge said. “She one of the good ones?”

“Yes. But she might want to kill me.”

“Eh. Sounds like some Blue team bull-hookey to me. You say robot ex girlfriends are our friends! Our allies! I say, if they shoot at you, you shoot ‘em back.”

Carolina wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but Beta seemed amused.

“Sarge, you might miss out on beautiful relationships like that.”

“I’ve never seen a beautiful relationship in my life and I don’t want to, either.”

Locus hadn’t moved, but somehow seemed a lot less sure of himself than before.

“Is she alive?” Carolina asked.

“Yes, although how healthy she is is not something Charon cared about.”

“Why keep her, then?”

“Research,” Beta said. She was paying almost battle-attention to the woman in the refrigerator; Carolina was struggling to ignore the datafeed into her mind. Fortunately it was mostly code that, without her looking at it, didn’t resolve itself for her but only for Beta, but it was still there.

“Is she …?” Carolina thought about Wash. She thought about Wash, she thought about white walls and shattered glass, she thought about his tired patience and the quiet in his room and why she’d left that first campground on Chorus, the image she’d left with of it in her mind, and how every place his time stopped to stand was a home; her heart clenched. She was ready to take a bullet for the woman in front of them. Her question didn’t matter to her.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay then, you’ve bought yourself some leeway, I guess. Can we get backup?”

“I mean, I don’t think you could even have anything worth hiding anymore,” Donut said. “Unless you’re, I don’t know, Hargrove’s clone, or something. We’ve seen weirder.”

“No,” Locus said. He’d been talking to the wall of cryo-pods. He turned to Carolina. “And you can, but I don’t want the new government trying to appropriate some of the technology in here.”

“You think we’re just not going to tell them?”

“No. I think you’re going to help me destroy it.”

“Weeeee should’ve brought Lopez,” Donut said.

*

While Carolina had to agree that Lopez would have been useful, Sarge, of course, had high explosives in the pack on his Banshee. In both packs. Carolina realized that those high explosives had taken a tumble along with the Banshee. She froze for a moment. Then she just told herself that life didn’t matter, this couldn’t really be anyone’s real life anyway, and that if she died she’d probably just come back and make the Church story weirder and more awkward, which would be a feat in itself, and maybe she’d get to decide which armor she wanted installed in.

Beta returned to Locus’ armor.

Locus stopped. “I tried to close some of the internal barriers in this complex. I thought I’d succeeded.” He pulled his shotgun and dropped slightly into a crouch. Everyone followed suit with their weapon of choice.

“So, is there a boss in here?” Donut asked.

“No. We were the management.”

“Ah, OK, that’s good, but I mean, are there any particularly nasty monsters?”

“The worst ones are in deep cryosleep.”

“Can we wake ‘em up?” Sarge asked.

“No,” Carolina replied.

*

There were a good dozen deep-frozen coffins that Locus wanted rescued, and after his first reveal Carolina didn’t pause to argue; Locus pushed and Carolina steered, shooting around his silhouette at all manner of things that she was pretty sure did not show up anywhere on official UNSC records of the war against the Covenant. Beta helped. From the granular, rough nature of the data stream, Carolina suspected that she was doing something to Locus’ hardware as well. She hoped that she wouldn’t wear herself out before the end of this little escapade, but she didn’t figure that it would last that much longer.

And she was right.

“This place is gonna blow!” Donut cheered, grappling one-handed with Sarge for the detonator button. Carolina dropped to the ground, out of the immediate line of fire, somehow no longer concerned. She didn’t see where Locus went. Beta was trying to channel power over the surface of her armor, hacking firmware, in general overreacting.

The air ripped, and then flattened into floating dust.

“I’m going to call the President,” Carolina said, levering herself vertical.

“You do that,” Sarge said. “I know that all of that Charon stuff is under a few tons of rock now, but after things get boring again we should dig it back up.”

“I don’t exactly know how we would stop you,” Carolina said.

*

Wash still wasn’t exactly sure what was going on. All he knew was that the UNSC delegate looked stressed, Tucker looked pissed, Phuong was smiling too much, but at least the Sangheili seemed stubborn and tired, not on edge, not that he could tell.

Noticing Wash hovering over his shoulder, Caboose looked at him and then back at his visor and with a few flicks of his large, square fingers panned the camera, or whatever it was that they were watching through, around the top of the room. There wasn’t much to see - lots of steel - but there were some rudimentary readouts.

“Can we change those?” Kai asked.

“I don’t see why not.”

Caboose smiled, and the scrolling Sangheili letters were, briefly, replaced with a smiley face.

The replacement was very brief, but Tucker blinked at it before overcorrecting and staring at one of the blinking Sangheili. “That was quick,” Kai said, surprised.

“He’s very perceptive.”

Kai looked at Wash. “Dude, we need to talk.”

“What about?” Caboose asked. “You aren’t fighting.”

“No, we aren’t,” Kai said, grinning widely at Wash.

“I’ll back off,” Wash said.

Kai rolled her eyes. “I don’t need anyone here to be any more uptight and lonely than they already are. But you’re obviously stressing out about Tucker.”

“That is what he does,” Caboose agreed. “People should not stress out about Tucker.”

“That’s true,” Kai said. “Anyway, General, don’t back off. Tucker wants you. I think you’re cute. You’re not as much of an asshole as you used to be, at least.”

“Tucker has me.”

Kai narrowed her eyes at him. “If he did, no one would have heard the end of it.”

“I mean - he does know that I trust him, right? We’re in this whole Generals thing together?”

Kai smacked her palm to her face. “Oh my god. Do you want to fuck my boyfriend or not?”

“Tucker is giving us a high five,” Caboose said solemnly.

Wash grabbed the helmet. Tucker was for the moment looking solemnly at something off camera; but a moment later he grinned up at them, a little manically, and gave them two thumbs up. It looked like he was considering trying to thumbs-up with his feet, too. Wash looked above the little digital window at the words ‘be washingtub’s boyfriend y / y.’

Wash threw the helmet at Caboose. “Turn that off!”

“Did he say yes or no?” Caboose asked innocently, fingers covering the visor.

It was Wash’s turn to facepalm. “I have no idea what to do with this,” he said.

“I don’t think any of us do, if you, you know, haven’t met anyone you know,” Kai said. “We’ll make it work if you don’t chase us off.”

Wash spread his fingers and stared at her from between them.

*

“I can’t believe you!” Phuong was saying, laughing, as she followed Tucker through the door into their apartments.

“Look, I had nothing to do with it!”

“Well, you obviously inspired it!”

“I guess I could be less amazing, yeah.”

Wash was sitting on the low bench in the common area that served as a couch, face burning as he stared at the tablet Caboose had hacked for him - something was going on on Chorus. Communications had been locked down. Carolina had responded to their private radio channel saying that, yes, something was up, things were coming back again, she wanted to talk to him one-on-one, she’d ping him when she had a spare moment. So now he was rather obsessively staring at radio logs. He hadn’t had his feelings for radio logs embarrassingly plastered across a conference room’s worth of potentially hostile strangers.

“Sooo,” Tucker said from the side of the bench. Wash didn’t look up. “I take it that Caboose put that up, yeah?”

Wash exhaled, shoulders rounding forward. “Yeah. Wait. If you knew that Caboose was responsible, why - ?”

“Nothing to lose by it. You know, Chorus doesn’t have a famous philanderer yet. How could I live with myself if I passed up that kind of opportunity?”

“I don’t think your reputation needs the help.” Wash was not succeeding at sounding flippant, not nearly as well as he would have liked.

Tucker sighed. “So you …”

“Obviously need to discourage my subordinate’s interest in my private life, yes.”

“No. What did you think I was gonna do if. OK, yes, Caboose put that message up, obviously. But if you had?”

“I wouldn’t put that message up there. If you’ll excuse me, I need to see if there’s some way back to Chorus. Check Carolina’s messages.”

Tucker took a step back, but only one. Wash didn’t look at him.

*

“I was just going to look for you,” Carolina said, leaning on the railing in front of the screens in the conference room. “Well, I was just gonna call you up.”

Wash looked - grim. Carolina masked her worry - if it was dangerous, he could handle it, and if it was really dangerous, he’d ask for help, and if it was personal, well, she’d just pretend it couldn’t be personal. There was a chance, however slim, that he’d ask for help in that scenario, too.

“Is it the Flood?”

“You know, somehow, we have that under control - for now. And it’s not the U.N.S.C. either. A new witness from Charon and. And from the Project has come forward.”

Wash inhaled in the place of flinching.

“Why are you trying to protect them, then?”

“They’re vulnerable to legal prosecution, and they’re high-profile enough that Vanessa and I are worried about their testimony raising tempers.”

“When do you expect them to testify?”

Carolina curled and uncurled her fingers around the railing in sublimated anxiety. “She’s set on testifying sooner rather than later. You and Tucker and everyone else need to get out of there.”

Wash checked behind himself. “Anyone we know?”

“Just - get ready.” Carolina hovered her hand over the exit call button, and pressed it when Wash, for a moment, made eye contact.

*

“Any crucial intel from wandering the halls, General?” Tucker asked, rather snootily. Wash, with an effort, chose to ignore that. What right did Tucker have to get offended that he didn’t want to play along, when Tucker had Kai, when they were behind enemy lines? Being part of blue team, apparently, meant belonging to blue team.

Instead he just said, “Yes, actually. I got a message from Carolina. Caboose, can you - provide us with some privacy?”

Kai said, “hey, he’s part of the team too,” as Caboose bent to his visor. Catching on, Tucker sent her a Look and held up his hands placatingly.

“Alright,” Wash said. “Somehow, the Flood situation is under control. That’s the good news. The bad news is that another witness to both Hargrove and the Director has surfaced and, while Carolina and Kimball have hold of her, she’s apparently really stubborn -”

“Surprise surprise,” Tucker deadpanned.

“And plans to record a confession soon. This is a problem for all of us because it’d be a really bad idea to remind the Sangheili of Project Freelancer. But we can’t stop her, even if we should, so we need to leave.”

“Got it,” Phuong said from across the room. She was trying to heat a cup of instant noodles with what looked like some kind of hand-held gun.

“What about Junior?” Tucker demanded.

“I don’t think - Phuong, how secure do you think Junior’s situation is here?”

“What, to leave him?” Tucker asked.

“He’s valuable,” Phuong said. “He’s also their kid. I get that this is hard. I mean, I think I -”

“Dude, you don’t know shit about this.”

Phuong switched off her gun or phaser or whatever and glared at Tucker. “Yeah, no shit, I don’t know what it’s like to be a parent. Indescribable. Or whatever. But I like to think I know something about how politics work, and if you can get past your emotions for a second, I’m saying that Junior is at least as safe here as he would be wherever we’d take him. And we aren’t.”

“She’s right,” Wash said. The moment he did, he knew he shouldn’t have. Lavernius sent him a heavy glare.

“Alright,” he said. “I guess we have our marching orders.”

*

Wash didn’t at all begrudge Tucker his choice to see his son before they left, probably not to return in person, truly, honestly, even if it would endanger the crew. Tucker bedgrudged him following him, but didn’t outwardly say much, beyond, “Well, this is helpful.”

Surprisingly, nothing happened.

Tucker closed the door on Wash’s face. Wash didn’t have quite enough energy to roll his eyes; he just ducked behind what looked like a cactus that he had to assume was analogous to Sangheili shrubbery. It wasn’t very convincing, but it was still much easier to do outside of power armor.

*

“Are we ready?” Vanessa asked quietly.

The Agent stared at the ceiling, reclined in her chair, tired, bone-tired. “I’ve been ready for a long time now.”

Carolina wasn’t there.

Carolina was in a ship, gunning it for U.N.S.C. space, a very small mote on the solar night’s winds and feeling very small. It was time to stop running - of course, she was only facing down one demon to run from the ghost at her back.

Washington was in a ship. Washington was in Tucker’s ship with Kai, and Caboose, and Phuong, although Tucker wasn’t feeling like captain just about then. They were monitoring all frequencies and hailing none.

Carolina had blanketed herself in radio silence.

*

“My name is not important, I barely remember it myself, but I am a war criminal. I worked for Doctor Leonard Church, behind friendly lines. I fought Covenant, targets who might have brought us peace earlier, and private citizens of the U.N.S.C., and terrorists, even though we used their same tactics.”

“Most of these things have been forgotten by the news cycle. I’ve been locked away for a long time, but I know how the world works. I wasn’t surprised to hear that my arrest warrant has probably been buried beneath some other bullshit for more trivial offenses. I could have hid on this remote planet, behind its reputation for strife and bad character, and waited out the tariffs.”

“But I was supposed to be dead, and my brothers and sisters were supposed to be dead, and you all thought that because Leonard Church was dead it was over. But Hargrove? Hargrove made money off of a dead soldier.”

“And I’m here to stand trial. Because there are so many others who have already been written their sentences.”

“I’m waiting. Come get me. My name is Moira Locklee. My codename is Connecticut, and it will be until I’ve spoken and you’ve all listened.”

At last - fin.


End file.
